Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tomkin 5183 days ago
> ...is that these topics are ones that anyone who calls themselves a front-end developer will need to be familiar with

I don't know about that. With Github you profess that experience with git is necessary to take advantage of "the rich open-source community that has arisen around front-end development technologies" – but that's not true. Explain how downloading the repo as a zip is slower or less advantageous than opening Terminal and typing commands – while I'm already looking at the Github project page in the browser? How would a purely front-end developer tell the difference?

> At the very least, you should be aware of tools like UglifyJS or Closure Compiler that will intelligently minify your code, and then concatenate those minified files prior to production.

In what world? This grates on me because it looks to be little more than grandstanding. And I hate grandstanding. What if you're coding with RoR or any other language with a sophisticated asset pipeline? Ugh.

50% of the techniques/tools you mentioned could be replaced or removed entirely without much issue in any front-end developer position I've encountered – in fact, this rigid brick layering of relative experience may even be looked upon as negative to an employer as it's clear that you are unwavering.

> that I wish someone had done for me in the past.

I think it's great for you to catalog and share, but to declare your list as the defacto baseline is ridiculous and presumptuous.

> Good front-end devs know to prefix any search engine query with mdn

Yeah, not an ego-derived rant at all.

1 comments

I won't address the rest of your comments, but please note that I said "tools like UglifyJS or Closure Compiler" -- if the RoR asset pipeline is taking care of this for you, then good! The point is that good front-end devs should be aware of the need for tools that address the various high-level topics I listed -- I just mentioned some tools that fill those needs for me.