The State of
Front End Development
2014
Pascal Rettig / Alignable.com
Pascal Rettig / Alignable.com
Usage Trends
Browsers
Technology
Job Market
Chrome is & will be top dog.
IE Still trending down.
Firefox stablized.
IE 8 (8%) + IE 9 (5%) = 13%
~87% Have a modern browser
~92% SVG, Canvas, HTML5 Audio
Mobile close to 1/3rd of web traffic
Apple still in lead in US (barely)
Android shipping waaay more units...
...but installed base means something.
Windows Phone, Blackbery MIA
Android 2 is new IE6
Google forked Webkit to Blink (Apr 2013)
Chrome and Safari/iOS no longer on same rendering engine
Opera on blink
Firefox, IE still have own engines
Mobile is no longer if-it-runs-on-iOS...
Gracefully degrade your CSS3 Whiz-bangs
Provide detection + warnings for SVG + Canvas
Or, ignore and here from your Grandma
(The Fun Stuff)
95%+ (IE9+, All Mobile)
Hardware accelerated (Except Android 2)
Realistic for Full Screen games
First-class HTML Citizen (Video Example)
Full vector drawing (D3 Show reel)
Browser-provided scene-graph & pixel-perfect events
90%+ (IE9+, Android 4+)
CSS Support (Including animations!)
Lives in its own DOM
Sibling of the same technology that powers almost all mobile games(OpenGL ES)
67%+ (IE11+(!), Chrome Android) source
No Safari/iOS, but soon? (speculation)
A Real sound API suitible for real-time mixing
IE has good, low-latency HTML5 Audio Support though
... And, as WebGL taught us
Powerful Video and Audio Capture
Peer-to-Peer connections
Communicating Audio, Video and Data
UDP-style unreliable channels
Multi-touch - Touchscreen Interfaces
GamePad - Joysticks!
Vibration - Haptic Feedback!
Full-screen - Immersion!
Orientation - Rotation Feedback!
Geolocation - Hyperlocality!
Web Workers - Multi-core-ality
A Low-level subset of JavaScript (Who cares?)
Mobile debugging, finally!
An awesome IDE in every browser.
With performance, memory, & auditing
Favorite features: $0, Highlight, Ctrl-O, Ctrl-F, Conditional Breakpoints.
(Semi-Opinionated)
Solve the JS Organization Problem (aka jQuery soup)
... and the Event Binding problem
Hype started with Backbone in 2011
jQuery still a component piece
Developer mindshare between Backbone, Angular, Ember & React (New!)
Learning? Start with jQuery, then Backbone (Beware the Voodoo!)
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Sites need mobile experiences
There's no guarantee on viewport size
Responsiveness is (almost) a given
But it's NOT the final, one-size-fits-all solution
"Experiential" Design, not just media-queries
HTML5 (the platform, not the browser technology) has won
The prototyping language for all the things
Browser is the Sandbox VM (LLVM, ASM.js)
JavaScript is the new BASIC
... But "The Browser is Dead" ... again
...without the browser penetration numbers
(YMMV)
...you should be ok (2.7% Nationally)
Track Record
Job Mobility / Millenial Bashing
10x Mythology
Tech-stack variety
Known Quantity
Don't come across as selfish. Do your homework.
Plant the seed that that's you: Hackathons, Startup Weekend
Network. Don't self-promote, Network.
You're not at as much of a disadvantage as you think.
Start with w/ HTML, CSS, then JS, Node
Add HTML/CSS to your skillset
Design in the browser and understand responsive
It's all UX these days
Embrace JavaScript, learn an MVC (or four)
Go Full-stack, treat HTML+CSS as a crafts
Learn enough design to be dangerous
Pascal Rettig @ Alignable.com - We're Hiring!