The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers

I have a lot of respect for good front-end people. They usually end up holding multiple roles (front end developer, user experience designer, accessibility designer, etc) that only marginally overlap and are also at the complete opposite end of what I work on.

It's the one area of tech I don't work either in or directly adjacent to. I treasure having worked with a couple of god-tier devs I can take my dumb questions to when I do have to touch their world.

As some point in the past decade, front-end development tipped over into feeling like GUI programming. The modern webpack-react-typescript boilerplate manages to capture all the early-2000's suck of Swing/AWT with none of the self-aware nostalgia.

I'm crossing my fingers that "Transpiler Free" becomes the new "W3C XHTML Valid" and a trend of minimalist, hipster bravado ushers in a simpler era of web development.