The datastore/backend guys will just
make sure the data is in a nice format (JSON or something) and that
its accessible from a url - their job is done my friends.
Ouch. For me this points up the absurdity of the demarcation between
front-end and back-end developer. Unless each of us understands the
whole sweep of it we're going to make stupid mistakes that will make
everyone else in our team miserable. Spare me, please, from working
with someone who believes that their job is done at the boundary of
any particular technology or technique. In my experience everything
in this field is too interconnected for that kind of separation to
work. It drives me crazy when graphic designers hand me one
Photoshop mockup per page and figure that their job of "designing the
site" is done. To do a decent job, a web graphic designer needs to
understand CSS which requires familiarity with HTML markup and
browser technology, and it helps hugely if they understand the
economies of scripting, the logic of database queries, and the
fundamentals of many other technologies that superficially have
nothing to do with graphic design. Just as a good print designer
needs to understand papers, inks, and printing technologies, a web
graphic designer needs to know the stuff that the page is made of in
order to make competent decisions. Looking at it from the back end,
there are convoluted handshakes between MySQL and PHP and HTML and
JavaScript and CSS, and bingo you're doing graphic design. Even if
we don't do all the work ourselves we have to maintain a healthy
appreciation for the limits, requirements, and efficiencies of all
the technologies in the daisy chain if we're going to produce really
great work.
Of course there's a difference between 'having an understanding' of a
technology and actually practicing it. I'm familiar with many of the
capabilities of Photoshop, for example, even while I acknowledge that
I'm a novice user and pass the fine work along to my partner the
graphics expert. But when I'm engineering the "back" end of a
project my consciousness has to extend all the way to the very
"front" or we'll end up with something that's lame at best, broken at
worst, a disappointment to the client, and expensive to fix.
I appreciate the efforts of the folks in the Netherlands to come up
with some standards of expertise by which they can judge a worker's
competence, but the front-end/back-end model that's driven this
discussion waves warning flags for me. I think it's a potentially
harmful paradigm if formalized into job categories with impermeable boundaries.
Did anyone but me read A.E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle as
a kid? Specialists are handy appliances, but give me a nexialist any
day if you want a brilliant solution.
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
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