Becoming a web developer is challenging. Either you’re self-taught or a degree holder both have to endure struggles on reading and understanding theories to apply them. Series of continuous cycles of failure to go through before having a successful page that would satisfy clients.

But the challenges does not stop there. Even if you are the best front-end web developer you think you are, challenges, struggles are still out there. To name some of them, I’ve gathered some answers given by professional web developers around the world.

Here are the following:

• Coding Javascript in a robust way. Backend software is evolved and it’s relatively easy to create good, maintainable code there, using MVC and mature CMS’s. With Javascript, I wouldn’t say that it’s as easy, since applications haven’t been as Javascript-intense as they are now for more than half a decade. You need to put more effort into making sure all Javascript is working in all browsers and that new code is written and placed in a maintainable way.
• Keeping a good balance between long term and short term design desitions. Too short, and the code will break apart upon your next change. Too long, your team wont be agile enough.
• Communicate key design concepts, best practices and library usage throughout the team. With too little freedom, people will get bored and do a bad job. With too much freedom people will create clusters of good code that doesn’t work well together. I don’t want a cathedral nor a bazaar.
• Balancing automated testing. Test too much, you spend time building tests. Test too little, stuff will break in production.
• Balancing iteration time between major framework upgrades.
• Getting people to understand MVC, for all the obvious reasons.
• Communicating SEO concepts, both to editors and developers.
• Keeping sites easy to maintain for editors. If the site isn’t easy to maintain for editors, it really doesn’t matter how good your code is. A site needs to be easy and fun to update and keep current.
• Making sure things look the same across all versions of Internet Explorer as they look in other browsers.
• Making sure every UI element (button, navigation, link) work as intended whether or not the user has JavaScript or cookies disabled (technology-independant development).
• Should I choose to use the current web browser standards and technologies (think HTML5 and CSS3), providing negative user experience in older browsers, that haven’t adopted this technology yet, or use images and other “tricky” methods to achieve the same results, sacrificing page loading time and modern standards standards.
• HTML tables
• Debugging JavaScript code (for performance or errors, especially if it’s minified)
• Managing client expectations.
• Educating the client.
• Preventing scope creep.
• Client insecurities/fears.

To know more about current challenges faced by different web developers you can join their conversation at Quora: “What are your biggest challenges as a front-end web developer?”

If you have somethings you want to add on, feel free to comment or send me an email of your biggest challenges as a front-end web develop. Thanks.

Becoming great in almost all aspect in life is not easy. It requires time and effort. It is not something you can have in 24 hours, it needs devotion and commitment.

Much like in web developing. Nowadays, people are into web developing and the market becomes very saturated because there are many of those out there.

A web developer can be one of your most critical hires. After all, that’s the person who will create the online face of your company and enable you to interact virtually with your customers.

So, it’s especially important that you hire the right talent the first time out. Otherwise, you risk hurting your business, as well as wasting time and money seeking a replacement.

To know how to become one of the best web developer, you need to consider the following:

Devops
Devops flies in the face of two traditional silos: production, which keeps things running, and development, which makes new stuff. The silos result in two camps with little sympathy for each other. Devops is a huge field in itself, encompassing continuous deployment and lots of automation. This is a sweeping summary, but the key thing developers need to understand is the stack they’re running on.

Know how to fix it.
The ability to fix apps requires excellent problem solving skills, but not just debugging code. Learn to debug and use other options and methods as well.

Drawing and writing
Drawing is the most direct way of communicating what stuff will be like. Developers must be able to draw their ideas. Developers must be able to prototype on paper, printing screenshots and scribble on them just to communicate their intention.

Understand the medium on what the internet says
Googling for ‘essential web development skills’ brings up what you’d expect. Framework knowledge, x-browser, CSS and JS. They list frameworks you should know, platforms you must be writing for and new trends you should be keeping an eye on. A developer can understand every detail of the system, tell you every feature of an API and a new CSS technology but still produce something unusable.

Developers, like everyone, need to understand their medium – but they must also understand the audience, be that the users, the team or other developers. They need to understand how their medium fits into the world (in other words, the production environment) and what effect it has (how people use it).

Coding don’t cut it anymore
We’re in a world where coding is becoming less impressive. Everyone builds sites, some of them code but you don’t have to. It’s no longer just the nerdy who can create sites, apps and features. Since the web came along and people could teach themselves there have been self-taught developers. But even the graduates are under threat.

Developers need to be better in two ways: breadth and depth. They need to understand the breadth of human interactions in their team and with the things they build. They need to understand the depth of the system they’re working with, down to the O/S.