What is a Frontend Developer: Soft Skills

Front end programmers are professionals who work on different visible technical aspects of a website or applications: user experience and web design (ux/ui), user interfaces, responsive on mobile devices … but they also need skills to work in teams and develop professionally.

In the world of software, not everything is about knowing programming languages (there is life beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript). They are important yes, but it is also important your way of working and interacting with other people, or what is also known as Soft Skills. And, to know what makes a frontend developer an expert techie, you should also take a look at these skills.

Soft skills in the tech world are the characteristics, skills and competencies that make up the personal traits (way of being, mentality and behavior) that you have in the work environment.

In web development sector, not everything is about chopping code, applying a web design correctly or testing if a mobile application and its user interface works correctly. As a front end developer, full stack or other professional you have to interact with a team, build relationships, sell your idea… even laugh and enjoy yourself with people similar to you.

It’s important to dedicate time to the development of soft skills as they can have a positive impact on your career development.

• First of all… what is a frontend developer?
• Soft skills from the frontend to the rest of the team
• Frontend soft skills for personal growth

First of all… what is a frontend developer?

To put it on a simple way, the frontend is the part of a digital product that interacts with users. The visible face, the pretty one, the showy one… front end differentiates from back end in that the last one mentioned connects to the database, it is the pillars, not accessible to a user.

A front end developer knows code. Specifically Javascript, which is a programming language common to all these professionals, as well as CSS and HTML. They also tend to work with frameworks such as AngularJS or ReactJS. But, in this article, we’re focusing on their soft skills.

Soft skills that define what a frontend developer is

Not all professions require the same soft skills, although they may resemble each other (for example, backend developers will need communication skills to explain their code ideas to other professionals). The list of Soft Skills is very wide and varied (communication, problem-solving, creativity, emotional intelligence,…), to focus on which are, from my point of view, the ones that can generate more impact in your professional growth as a frontend.

Soft skills from a frontend dev to the rest of the team

Communication

Having good communication skills implies having the ability to actively listen and understand other perspectives, allowing ideas to be shared effectively.

If you work in an office environment communication is usually synchronous, face-to-face and where you get immediate feedback on the issues to be resolved. This is not always preferred by developers because of the feeling that it can be a “waste of time” and because it “demands” an immediate response, which can generate stress.

On the other hand, mostly when working remotely, there is also asynchronous communication with which you can communicate with other people without it being in real time. Normally synchronous communication usually ends with a ticket in a task tool, an email or some kind of asynchronous communication.

It is important to understand that when an organization uses this type of communication it does not expect an immediate response. But this doesn’t mean they leave unanswered issues in the air, everything must be solved.

Collaboration and teamwork

This concept seems very basic, to know how to work in a team and be collaborative, but that does not mean that it should not be relevant.

In this aspect I would highlight three points:

• Sharing knowledge: both internally in the company and your expertise, technologies, tools, methodologies and everything that you know. This is something that is highly valued at team level. It is very motivating to be able to learn from your colleagues and teach them what you know. Saving your knowledge to yourself will not make you indispensable in a company.
• Align yourself with the company’s objectives: feel free to propose ideas that can have an impact on these objectives even if they do not depend on your area, be critical of the roadmaps… In short, anything you can contribute to the achievement of the common objective is a highly valued plus.
• Helping your colleagues: this generates a better work environment, makes you more united with your colleagues and therefore the whole team works in a more positive way.

Soft skills of the personal growth frontend

Adapting to change

In the software world it is quite common for last minute changes to appear, for a functionality to be “undone” or for something that has taken you days to develop not to go into production.

You have to know how to adapt to these changes so that they do not affect your productivity or your mood. An interesting exercise is to understand why there have been these changes and learn how to avoid them in the future.

Having clear goals and being objective about which tasks can have the greatest impact on the company’s metrics helps to ensure that the changes will not cause discomfort.

Ownership

It’s also related to being responsible. It’s very common that in technology each developer has some assigned tasks, by agreement with the team, for which he is responsible.

These tasks, although they are usually related to developing code, sometimes need the involvement of other people (that systems people prepare something, that a new endpoint is developed…), managing this participation of other people is your responsibility as owner of the task.

On the other hand, it is also important to know when to assume mistakes, not always everything goes right the first time, it is necessary to know how to say when mistakes have been made and the most important thing in this aspect is to understand why it happened.

Presenting a mistake as a learning experience adds a lot both at team and company level, since it allows not to do it again in the future.

Continuous learning

As our last point and being a fan of Lean methodologies, I think it is very important, not only at a professional level but also at a personal level, to always want to learn.

On the one hand, at a professional level and dedicating yourself to software development, you should like to learn, whether new technologies, libraries or tools. Software evolves and as a software developer you also have to evolve. Of course: you don’t have to go crazy studying everything that comes out because it is impossible, but consider the ones that make more noise or get more relevance and make you grow in your area.

On a personal level, learning does not stop making you grow as a person. Learn from mistakes and turn them into knowledge, listen and learn from your environment, get to know other people’s experiences that you have never lived, be curious, question the “why” of things…

Sources: TheBalanceMoney, Ekon