Confused Girl: What is Frontend Development?

Hello friends, let me be a nerd who doesn't make any sense one more time for this blog post 🤓

For a while now I’ve been having a hard time explaining what I do. It seems that saying I am a frontend dev is not enough. Working in this industry, making connections, the longer I stay and I just end up more confused 😵

Is it transforming designs into html/css elements?

Is it Wordpress, Joomla, Big Commerce and/or Magento?

Is it App development via Javascript?

Is it PHP?

Is it consuming APIs?

Or is it exposing those APIs too using javascript technologies?

I'm not here to say that one is better or far more superior than others because I don't believe in being great at everything, specially when every single type of a frontend developer I listed above requires a lot of time to master. 

What's wrong with that?

"You're an IT right? Can you reformat my laptop?"

"You're an IT right? Can you hack my friends Facebook page?"

These misconceptions are not new, and also they are triggering 🔥because I don't know how to do those things.

And what's different is that those concern are outside my chosen specialty. I don't have to know those things. 

Imagine being asked:

"How come it's like this instead of like that in your design?"

"I want a wordpress blog, can you do it for me?"

Does it mean I have to have knowledge in all of these types of a frontend developer to call myself one? (It might take me all my life.)

Am I not a frontend developer because I haven't had any experience in using React? For only having basic to 0 knowledge with Node? For not using CSS grid and variables (yet)? For having 5 attempts with a Wordpress blog with no luck at getting it right?

When does it get confusing

It gets confusing when my college classmates working in a different company, who share the same job title as I do, mainly works on frontend stuff I have 0 knowledge about. 

It gets confusing when there are job openings and then in the end I am not aligned with what the company requires. I know they say IT/programmers are in demand almost everywhere I go but I also know that finding a company that fits the kind of frontend I fell in love with, it doesn't happen everyday.

It gets confusing when I get asked what I recommend for a school's curriculum (as an OJT supervisor). Should I suggest more courses on design? more subjects that tackles/challenges logic? 

It gets confusing when we plan (our company) our yearly hackathon (frontend category). One student had asked us why do we have backend for a frontend challenge 🤔

What was worse was that I understand the confusion. 

Sometimes we are backend developers too

So what are we really? Frontend or backend developers? 👀

I know of someone who used to say "I don't like frontend because there's no logic in it" 😳😳😳

I don't mean to offend anyone but sometimes I get offended too when people think all I do is design because 1. What I do is so much more than that and 2. Design is not even my strongest skill (I wish it were tho). 

I know I enjoy playing around with CSS, specially when my head hurts from too much recursive thinking. Sometimes codepen is my therapy after a long day. But these are my sometimes and not my everyday. My everyday code is a lot more boring than that. 

I know people who chose this kind of frontend to be their everyday, and they make magic happen 🌈 and we make our own magic too on our kind of development (okay maybe not as aesthetically pleasing but still) 🌈

To conclude

Maybe this is just a terminology issue. 🤔

Javascript had become so big all over the years that we couldn't limit it to become just one thing. It's not just in our browsers anymore. It's not just about making things prettier anymore. It's more than dropdowns, popups, modals, parralax.

Well, I am still as confused and I just want to share my thoughts to the world (or like to the 2-3 pax that will get to read this).

What do you think?

And also, is it "front-end", "frontend" or "front end"?

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2020 update: Wow reading this again and I'm still as confused 🤷🏻‍♀️. I feel like I could've worded my thoughts better but will leave this as is.