It ain't easy being a Front End Web Programmer

I once heard it said that, "Nobody cares what kind of hammers were used to build the house," when talking about web programmers.

What a load of ignorance! They would care if they had to fix the house and found that it was made out of Styrofoam! I look at the horrible, inefficient code I inherited when I started at my job and how much I've improved it. Functions that before were 20-25 lines long (that simply showed or hid something) are now 3 lines long. I re-wrote another that was over a hundred lines long that would add/remove options from a <select> and my version is about 24 lines (and fully dynamic, unlike the old one which required a separate function for each select!). Massive, enormous tables with spacer cells all over the place have been replaced with clean, efficient <div>'s.

How does this affect you? Well, it's that much less data to transmit from the server to the client, so it speeds things up.

It also makes development SOOO much easier. I try to make everything I write as dynamic as possible. I hate hard-coding things!

Sometimes as a programmer I get lonely. The other programmers that work here can't appreciate how I've streamlined things because they're all Back End programmers. They like static, hard coded stuff and live in a world that hasn't changed in years (when's the last time SQL was updated?).

I've learned so much about CSS and javascript and making dynamic magic on the Front End, and I have noone to share it with. I could go on programming forums but there never seems to be time to go in those - so many posts to read through! When I try talking about it, people's eyes glaze over and they get bored and change the subject. Noone wants to hear about how the house was built.

The best recognition I and other Front Enders can hope for is to wow people with effects (script.aculo.us, etc.), like the sliderbar I created for the new BG site. But - oh wait - nobody cares how it works. :( Designers get all the glory, front end programmers are relegated to the background.

It ain't easy bein' a Front End Web Programmer...