Technical Concepts for a Good FED

fed-technical-concepts

This is a list of technical concepts that a good Front-End Developer would know

* Language Basics
  * syntax
  * types (what JavaScript's basic types are; how to check if a value is a particular type)
  * equality (the concept of truthy/falsy; the difference between `==` and `===`)
  * objects and arrays (when to use one over the other)
* Debugging effectively with developer tools
  * Breakpoints 
  * Profiling
  * Networking
  * Modifying requests/responses with a proxy
* How browsers render the page
  * repaints and reflows
  * how assets are loaded, and where they block vs. load in parallel
* Understand 'this' and scope
* Asynchronous operations
  * Callback style vs Promises
  * Flow control: chaining promises, running async in serial and parallel (with and without limits), etc.
  * Error handling
* Writing unit tests and integration tests (and knowing the difference between them)
* Events
  * custom and native
  * what events bubble, and in which direction
  * how to avoid memory leaks with events
* DOM APIs (Working with Nodes, localstorage, etc)
* HTTP: making AJAX requests, status codes, HTTP headers, etc.
* Build tools (grunt, eslint, continuous integration) and build steps – why do we minify, what are source maps, etc
* How to write maintainable code
  * The importance of APIs as contracts
  * How to version code appropriately (semver)
* Node.js
  * how to write "backend" JS using basic node APIs
  * using npm to install modules and run scripts
* Challenges of CSS at scale (and how to address them)
* Thinking functionally: e.g. the difference between a for loop and .forEach: pros and cons of each; writing functions with no side-effects, composing functions/higher order functions
* Security: How to deal with user input to prevent HTML and script injection
* An understanding of responsive and adaptive design
* Being able to think of applications as a composition of components - not just the DOM.

## Bonus Future-facing Points
* ES2015 syntax
* Transpiling with Babel (or some other language to JS)
* HTTP2 (and how it affects what the best practice is around bundling assets)