What makes an excellent front-end developer?(for my English speech)

What makes an excellent front-end developer?

　　Let me please start this talking by saying that what is the front-end developer?

　　Front-end web development is the practice of producing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a website or Web Application so that a user can see and interact with them directly. The web pages you are reading everyday are just written by front-end developers. Some of the web pages are beautiful and fast, but others are too slow to open and often go wrong. It depends on the level of developers.

　　But, what makes an excellent front-end developer?

　　Obviously, you need to master the three trivial building blocks of the term front-end more than HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Now to be an excellent front-end developer, you should know a bit more than just front-end, know the full stack, how the applications works, what are related to what, how does the information flow happen, what is the architecture etc.

　　You need not be an expert back-end developer, but you should know how things happen. The term expert is vague and vast. But following things will help.

　　Just know what a Memcache is, how the server works, and how the code is deployed.

　　I also suggest to know a little about http protocol and how stuffs work internally, this will help a lot when it comes to optimising your code.

　　Known at least one scripting language decently - say Python or Ruby. Both have their frameworks that comes with them that will help you to make an application on your own. Just do some CRUD(Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) operations.

　　JavaScript in detail

　　Term JavaScript is vast, jQuery is must in the current programming world. But do not overuse it, stick to native JavaScript whenever you can. Learn new frameworks, read codebases and learn how to organise codes. Other than just learning a framework, know why and when to use them (trust me this is really important, when you decide to make something on your own).

　Angular JS, Ember JS and Reacts JS are the most famous and popular frameworks that exist as of now. Learn about MVC (Model, View, Control), and how it works in detail. In the above frameworks, Angular and Ember are based on MVC. React is not actually a framework, but a library. Facebook uses React in it's front-end.

　　Know how to use cookies and caching.

　　Talk to expert coders, make apps from scratch so that you can sharpen your skills. Practice, practice and practice.

　　Front-end testing

　　Know at least a little bit about testing the front-end code.  Here is a nice little stack overflow thread on the same. There are different tools like Jasmine, Mocha and so on to test your JavaScript code. MVC libraries comes with inbuilt features to write test cases.

　　Optimisation

　　Learn to optimise your code, be it JavaScript, HTML or CSS. Follow DRY (Do Not Repeat Yourself) principle. Follow best principles, read codes done by expert programmers. You may find different small hacks and nice practices that can make life simpler. Spend time on Github.

　　CSS and HTML

　　These are the basics when it comes to front-end, and it is a must. Time of CSS is slowly passing by , learn SASS or LESS , which are scripts that can be compiled into CSS, and allows much more easier and efficient writing of code.　　

　　UX

　　User Experience is a common term now, read and research about it. Be decent when it comes to UX. Learn softwares such as Photoshop and Illustrator to do the design , and learn to identify the user requirements and design accordingly.

　　UX is a vast topic , and you need not necessarily know it to be a front end developer , but if you are an excellent one like a whole package you must know it too. Check out famous web applications and study their interaction flow , User interfaces how they convert and engage users in their website.

　　Read articles by UX people , watch videos and learn from experienced people.

　　Create websites and applications for fun, that's when you really start loving it. Fall in love with the front end, just don't code for money and success. Code for a cause, code for happiness.

All these things won't make you the best out there, but it will certainly help you to kick of your career as a front-end guy. It's all about the passion you have towards it and challenging yourselves.

　　Happy coding.