Ask HN: Does pure Front End still exist?
> Proven experience of infrastructure planning and working with development teams to enable high availability of services in-line with SLOs and error budgets
> Evangelist for infrastructure as code and working with immutable infrastructure and configuration tools such as Terraform to achieve end-to-end automation.
> Experience working with CI/CD solutions and gitops to enable automation of infrastructure at scale (pipeline design, testing and best practices using Jenkins/Concourse/GoCD/Gitlab)
> Programming and scripting to a production level including testing (Go/Python etc) Cloud Platforms (designing infrastructure deployment patterns within GCP and using managed services, such as big data tooling effectively)
> Logging systems (deployment of and scaling of logging solutions, both cloud native and self-hosted e.g. Stackdriver, Elastic)
I don't think any of this is "front end" to me.
Here is another one:
> JavaScript, Typescript, React + Hooks, Redux, Node.js, HTML5 and SASS/CSS
> Webpack, Babel, Jest, Cypress and React Testing Library
> UX/UI design
> Docker and Kubernetes
> CI/CD and modern DevOps tools
From this list, the only ones that are "front end" to me are JavaScript (for DOM only, no server-side), HTML, CSS/SASS. UX/UI design is not front end development to me, it is a separate field, albeit with some overlap like accessibility.
I really believe the traditional role of pure front end no longer exist.
When JavaScript became the everything language (thanks nodejs), the role of front end became more integrated with back-end due to the influx of back-end devs writing JS for server side. Now we see that most "front end" devs don't even write plain JavaScript, first it was TypeScript - a back-end language imo, and now we are seeing WASM as perhaps another nail in the coffin.
I remember reading an article on HN, proposing a "front of the front end" developer [0], which I think is pretty much symptomatic of the convoluted situation.
Before when i used to apply for jobs, i would get some kind of html/css test. Now when i apply i get a hacker-rank test to deal with some algorithms, and i have to choose from js,ts,python,c++ etc. I think it says it all.
[0] https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/front-of-the-front-end-and-back-of-the-front-end-web-development/