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

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tq-bit • Edited

Frontend developers

are responsible to design user interfaces (UIs) for the web. They're doing so using

  • HTML & CSS for structure and styles, respectively
  • A browser in which the website / webapp can run
  • Javascript to give the user a way to interact with the website / webapp.

Frontend devs work closely together with designers and implement simple to sophisticated UIs. They also collaborate with backend developers to show persistent data from the backend to users of the website.

Common technologies on the frontend are:
-> Javascript frameworks, such as React, Vue, Angular, are used to streamline the process of development
-> Browser APIs, such as Websockets, Fetch or WebGL

Backend developers

are responsible for the serverside. Since this is a broad term, I'll exclude system architect- and admin tasks to focus on the basic idea.

Backend developers are responsible to build the Information Architecture of a system on the serverside.

Backend devs are often specialized on one or few technologies. They're working closely together with architects and admins to design IT systems. At the same time, they're assisting frontend devs to bring data to the customer. Or collect and organize their data, respectively.

Common technologies are, only to name a few:

  • Selfhosted, batteries-included solutions, such as the LAMP - stack
  • Standalone runtime environments, such as Node.js, Python3 or PHP, to develop custom backend applications
  • Each of them comes with famous frameworks, such as Express for Node, Flask for Python3 and Laravel for PHP. They aim to make development of bigger applications easier

Modern technologies enable backend devs to outshore administrative tasks to third party services, such as Amazon Webservices (AWS) or Netlify. This again is a topic for its own.