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Discussion on: What's the difference between Front-end and Back-end development?

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Joe Mainwaring

If you were to think of building a web application like building a car, front-end engineers would add the paint, rims, window tint, interior, and accessories. Backend engineers would be the ones who deliver the engine, transmission, suspension, and chasis.

Front end will focus on what the end user sees and interacts with. Backend will focus on making it actually work.

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Aaron Reese

This is where the confusion comes in though. Front-end USED to mean the HTML, CSS and text copy and back-end was anything on the http request.
TODAY front end (imho) also requires form validation, dynamic update of DOM based in user actions, management of the data store, local storage strategy to work offline, async fetch and post data without a page refresh, manipulation of data from an API endpoint that is not in quite the right format
All if this requires extensive knowledge of JS and/or frameworks, computer algorithms, and entity modelling. If you include the new WASM technology then you will also need to know A LOT of .net/python/rust/go

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Joe Mainwaring

All of that was either in play a decade ago or was just coming out, and I can speak from experience that you don’t need to learn all of that.

Frameworks exist to help accelerate implementation of most of the features you listed.