What Web Development Means

…to me.

The big news today is that beginning Monday, February 3, I will be starting a new position
with GoHealth, a company that sells health insurance to consumers. I’ll be working on both
consumer-facing and intra-company web applications, utilizing Ruby, JavaScript, or whatever
works best for the task at hand.

This comes at the end (or should I say, beginning!) of a process in which I thought more about
web development, and more specifically: what it means to me.

Front end, back end

Recently I had considered myself strictly a back-end developer. That is, I saw our web development
stack as this…

• Browser (HTML, CSS/LESS)
• Server (PHP, XSLT)
• Remote APIs

There was, I felt, a pretty clear delineation of responsibilities there. Browser is front-end. Server is back-end.

As I dug into enterprise web development, the picture started to get a little blurrier.

• Browser (HTML, vanilla JavaScript)
• JavaScript Frameworks (jQuery, Angular.js, Backbone.js, etc.)
• Server-side Frameworks / API consumers (node.js, Django / web.py, Ruby on Rails)
• API Implementors (can be enterprise Java or C# but it really just depends)
• Databases and other data sources

I haven’t worked on anything on the other side of the API wall… which probably meant I wouldn’t
pick be able to take on authentic back-end roles (i.e., server-side business logic). That leaves focusing
on web development over non-web development.

A better web developer

Going into this new phase, I have a couple of goals.

1. Increase my exposure to different web technologies. This is particularly important with reference to transferable skills. I’m very good when it comes to working with the Tessitura API, but to be a full-stack developer, I’m going to have to step into the full spectrum of web technologies.
2. Speak at meetups about these technologies. They could be OpenGov Hack Nights or meetups downtown. But nothing guarantees knowing your technology more than having to publicly speak about it. :-D