What a Respected Frontender Should Know in 2024

Learning frontend from scratch in 2024 is not at all easy: you need to choose a stack that will remain relevant until the end of your training and start working. It’s also not easy for experienced employees, because they need to monitor the demand in the market in order to remain in demand.

To find out what’s trending this year, we asked middle and senior frontenders to answer the questions:

What should a front-end developer be able to do in 2023? Describe your ideal stack
What are the frontend trends in 2024? What do you need to study to improve?
What stack of specialists are missing on the market?

Here’s what they said.

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What should a front-end developer be able to do in 2023? Describe your ideal stack

Nikolay Prokhorov

Senior frontend developer at ITFB Group

Over the past year, the field of frontend development has not received any particularly notable updates or new technologies that would be worth learning for everyone. Vue in its third version systematically continues its development and improvement, Angular has received several major versions, Svelte is gaining momentum, and TypeScript has moved to its fifth version.

As before, the frontend is JavaScript and TypeScript, HTML and CSS frameworks. It is important for a front-end developer to have a good understanding of the specifics of languages, monitor changes and browser support for new features, use ESLint and Prettier to improve the quality of his code, and promptly abandon outdated technologies. For example, Webpack is losing popularity as many teams use the faster Vite. TypeScript has become a standard in frontend development, and many new projects are already using it. The architecture is also worth mentioning – a large number of projects have appeared that use Feature-Sliced Design.

However, while the technologies themselves have remained largely unchanged, the approach to development has changed significantly. The year 2023 has become a real revolution in many areas due to the rapid growth in popularity of AI and, in particular, language models such as ChatGPT. AI assistants help to significantly reduce the time spent working on typical tasks, allowing you to receive code in a couple of moments, which, after checking and finalizing, greatly simplifies the task at hand. ChatGPT can help you quickly sketch out a function, component, or TypeScript. So far, fortunately, models cannot cope with voluminous or complex tasks completely without human intervention, but they can serve as a faithful assistant in everyday work.

The ideal stack in 2023 is the latest versions of Vue, TypeScript and Tailwind. The framework is actively developing and improving. If Vue of the second version, support for which ended in December, lagged behind React in terms of convenience, then the third version is already quite successfully competing with the leader: Vue allows you to focus on the task and takes the issue of optimization upon itself, and at the same time retains flexibility and all the necessary conveniences in developing. Tailwind, in turn, is convenient in its simplicity. There is no need to think about the names of classes, child elements and modifiers, wrappers and containers, and configuration settings allow you to adapt Tailwind to any design conditions on the project.

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Alexander Guzenko

Chief expert programmer, IT_ONE

Regardless of the level of the programmer, he must have a strong base. Even juniors are expected to know at least the theory of JS and asynchronous JS. This applies to hard skills.

However, a more important requirement from juniors is often the ability to work with information and proactivity. Nobody wants to hire an employee with little initiative who will constantly bombard you with stupid questions. Even from a junior, you want to get at least someone who will independently go through most of the path that the team lead has built for him.

At an interview, it will be a huge plus to be able to demonstrate your ability to quickly find information and solve problems with a minimum of outside help.

For example, a phrase from a junior “I was able to independently create a beautiful landing page with complex animations in one week using the react-spring library, which was previously unknown to me,” will instantly distinguish this candidate from the gray mass of hundreds of monotonous resumes.

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Vitaly Matvievich

Head of the development team at the software developer MyOffice

Everything in the core stack is stable: we required and continue to require from candidates a deep and practical understanding of Javascript, Typescript, HTML5, CSS3, a broad outlook in terms of browser-based features and APIs.

Particular attention was paid to the candidate’s ability to propose a variety of technical solutions for practical problems, to be able to “defend” the chosen solution and to write clean, readable code. The candidate’s practical experience also played a big role: what problems had already been solved, what mistakes to step on, what technologies to use.

This is important for us, because the company’s products are quite complex and the barrier to entry for a developer becomes too high if before that he, say, was mainly involved in small projects, layout or form design (sorry).

To a lesser extent, we focused on specific frameworks and libraries, since from our experience, the transition between frameworks for a specialist strong in the basic stack is almost seamless.

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Alexander Mirankov

Lead Software Engineer

In 2023, the ideal front-end developer stack included the following technologies:

React.js or Angular: Frameworks for building component-based user interfaces;
TypeScript: Static typing to improve code security and maintainability;
Webpack and Babel: Tools for building and transpiling code;
SASS/LESS: Preprocessors to improve style management;
Jest or other testing frameworks: To ensure a high level of reliability.

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What are the frontend trends in 2024? What do you need to study to improve?

Nikolay Prokhorov

Senior frontend developer at ITFB Group

Microfrontends. For several years now, the technology has been actively implemented by many companies, since it allows the development of one product by distributed and independent small teams. Many small interfaces come together to form the final product. The cost of implementing microfrontends may be a decrease in performance and an increase in the size of the bundle, but the speed and availability of the Internet offsets this disadvantage.

New releases, libraries, specifications. The front-end field is one of the most rapidly developing, and therefore it is always important to monitor changes and innovations. Just a couple of months after the release of the third version of Nuxt, many companies have already added experience with it or at least understanding it to their requirements.

SSR, PWA, site optimization, accessibility. And even though these technologies have been in use for a long time, but with a large number of sanctions and difficulty in releasing their mobile applications, companies transfer part of the traffic from applications to mobile versions of their sites. In this regard, it is especially important to learn how to properly develop websites adapted for phones and tablets, how to optimize them, and what features should be taken into account.

WebAssembly (Wasm). As you know, JavaScript is not very good in terms of performance and may not cope with complex and highly loaded interfaces. Wasm solves this problem, and it is used, for example, in Figma or in web clients of trading platforms. Moreover, the technology can be used not only on the web, and therefore studying it will expand the range of its capabilities.

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Alexander Guzenko

Chief expert programmer, IT_ONE

In React development, the Next.js library is now trending; it makes life much easier if you need server-side rendering of any type. Also, to my joy, it is now becoming fashionable to understand front-end architecture. Modular architecture, onion architecture, FSD and knowledge of other methodologies make the candidate stand out from the rest. This is an indicator that a person is developing in the field, striving to write not just working code, but code that will be easier to maintain.

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Vitaly Matvievich

Head of the development team at the software developer MyOffice

I’m not ready to draw a conclusion about trends for the entire market, but in my subjective opinion, specialists should swing in the following directions:

Progressive Web Apps (PWA). The trend is not new, but it seems to me that it will remain relevant. At least in our company – for sure.
Working with graphics and animations. Browser capabilities for working with graphics are growing, including the use of 3D or AR solutions. Skills in this area can be useful both in sophisticated media projects and in various industry-specific web applications.
Working with AI. My personal choice is ChatGPT, an excellent assistant that significantly speeds up work on many tasks. However, you also need to be able to use this assistant correctly. Once I allowed a candidate at an interview to use it to solve a problem and… nothing came of it. Because the ability to ask the right question and apply the answer is also a learned skill.
Oddly enough, I recommend learning hard skills in terms of architecture, algorithms, and web application optimization practices. This can make you stand out from other candidates.

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Alexander Mirankov

Lead Software Engineer

Frontend trends in 2024 and required skills:

SSR (Server-Side Rendering) and SSG (Static Site Generation): SSR and SSG allow you to create web applications with better performance because part of the rendering is done on the server or while the application is built. This reduces loading times and improves responsiveness. It also has a positive effect on search engines (SEO);
Mobile Development: Creating web applications for a variety of devices is impossible without using responsive design that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes. With the increasing number of users preferring mobile phones for Internet surfing, this approach is not just desirable, but essential;
A little knowledge of backend development: In the modern world, front-end developers are facing increasingly high demands. Companies value specialists who have T-shape knowledge, that is, a broad outlook in various fields, but at the same time a deep understanding of a certain area. In this context, it is recommended to pay attention to expanding your skills in the field of server development, namely Node.js;
Cloud technologies: Cloud technologies are becoming an integral part of modern IT infrastructure. It’s important for a front-end developer to understand and master the fundamentals of cloud solutions, and AWS – the most popular cloud provider at the moment – is a great place to start this dive.

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What stack of specialists are missing on the market?

Nikolay Prokhorov

Senior frontend developer at ITFB Group

If we talk about frontend, there is a shortage of Vue developers. Most front-end courses focus on React and cover Vue minimally or not at all. Of course, there are more vacancies for the React stack – about one and a half to two times, however, the influx of junior developers who eventually become middle developers is significantly higher.

If we touch on the entire IT sphere, then, of course, with the growing popularity of AI, the need for ML developers is also growing. This is perhaps one of the highest paying areas with a high entry threshold and low competition.

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Vitaly Matvievich

Head of the development team at the software developer MyOffice

In general, I would not say that there are few front-end developers on the market, but I would highlight several areas:

There are very few guys who know how to deeply “excavate” application performance: work with the Performance API, profiling, and analyze memory snapshots. However, as the complexity of applications increases, this skill seems to be increasingly in demand. In our team, we are now actively pumping up this expertise.
Subjectively, it seems that there are not enough developers with deep expertise in ElectronJS. But perhaps the market doesn’t need them. 🙂
Over the course of this year, I have seen almost no candidates who had hardcore experience in PWA development. I would really like to see it.

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Alexander Guzenko

Chief expert programmer, IT_ONE

Almost any stack. In my practice, usually out of 10 technical interviews for a Middle/Senior position, only 2-3 candidates can really qualify for the role of at least a Middle developer. And I’m talking about the most popular React/Redux technology stack. Now imagine what the hiring situation is like in more highly specialized areas, where, for example, you need to work with complex animations through some Pixi.js…

In conclusion, I want to give advice to beginning developers – try to find yourself a mentor. At the very beginning of your development journey, it is sometimes difficult to choose the optimal path, it is difficult to validate your decisions, and it is difficult to understand whether you are developing correctly or not. I myself am a mentor for a junior and it doesn’t take me much time, but for a junior it can save a lot of effort and time.

It is important to understand that a mentor is not about solving problems, but about advice. That is, I, as a mentor, don’t write code, I practically don’t look at the code, I just answer questions and give advice along the lines of “better try library X, it will suit you better because…”.

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Alexander Mirankov

Lead Software Engineer

Frontend Security Specialists: Due to the increase in security threats, web application security experts are required;
Mobile responsive specialists: Developers who can deliver a great user experience across multiple devices.

It should be noted that in addition to technical skills, communication skills and the ability to quickly adapt to new technologies are also important, which are key for a successful career in the front-end field in 2024.

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If you want to join the ranks of experts and send an answer from your company or yourself, then write to experts@tproger.ru, we will tell you how to do this.