João Marcus Fernandes
2 min readJul 29, 2016

How moving from Design to Back-end made me a better Front-end

Back to 2011, my mother said:

"You stay too much on internet, you should do some course".

That’s when I first started on web as web designer. The era that Flash(RIP for Lord’s sake) was the new black. HTML and CSS was my very best-friend, and the real pain maker. JavaScript wasn’t mature enough, or I wasn’t mature enough to understand it’s powers.

Tired of all this thing, I began studying other languages, like Ruby, began learning REST concepts, Databases integration, and all the HTTP talk. Everything was fine, seeing the black window with white letters telling me that the system was fine, like I was on Matrix. My Designer side began to scream, louder and louder, until I’ve understood that Both sides, are opposite and at the same time friends, they are focused on different things, but have the same goal.

That was when I decided, "I will become the integration of both, I will become front-end", that is almost poetry, but the truth is, being the front-end means, being the integration, being half-designer so you can understand new patterns and apply, like Responsive Design, and being half-developer so you can understand, maintain and integrate the client with the server.

To be a good front-end, you must understand that every stage has it's importance, even if you like design more than development, or the opposite. You may know that if there is no communication beween the extremes, there will be only chaos.

Hope this text help you with your team, hope it help you see that been front-end is delicate. If you are a Back-end or Designer, or any other area, that text is for you too, watch out of you are depreciating some stage, a divided team tends to lose every play.

João Marcus Fernandes
João Marcus Fernandes

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