Frontend Team Roles and Skills, Breaking the Silos and Borders
About 15-20 years ago, web application developers had the knowledge and the technical skills necessary to create an application: HTML, CSS, JS, PHP/Python/ASP, Web Server Management, MySQL/Postgres (both data and service management), etc.
With time the web applications became more complex with bigger requirements. New technologies, frameworks, and paradigms bounce into the development and pushed developers to specialize in some areas arising new roles from this specialization.
Nowadays, the equivalent typical roles for a web application that cover the exposed tasks/skills and the typical requirements are Designer, Frontend developer, Backend developer, Platform engineer, and, in a data-oriented company: Data Engineer, Data scientist, etc.
- The design team takes care of the first thing the user sees on an application: the visuals.
- The frontend team is in charge of implementing those visuals and user interaction.
- The backend manages the user interactions with the data and implements the business logic.
- DevOps (platform) creates the context (servers, databases, networking) for everything to work.