Blog

Professional Front-end Engineering

September 2nd, 2008

Web Development

Yahoo!’s Nate Koechley recently posted slides and audio from a presentation he gave on Professional Frontend Engineering.

Yahoo! is a big site, and it works really well. As an example of cutting edge excellence in modern browser technologies, you’d be hard pressed to find many better examples today. Their mail application alone is an exceptional example of modern browser-based Web applications in action. Additionally, their YUI libraries are exceptional.

If you’re looking at deploying modern Web applications or looking for a modern user experience, why not look to the experts that are succeeding for inspiration and motivation? There’s few places where you could go wrong examining a set of sites such as Yahoo!’s — They’re great influences.

Yahoo! hires an excellent staff to deploy and maintain their sites. They are smart people who add a lot of value to the industry and many of whom regularly write and speak at industry events. One such person is Nate Koechley, a senior Frontend Engineer over at Yahoo!.

Nate’s Professional Frontend Engineering presentation is a must read for anyone involved in building a Web team or deploying anything on the Web.

So what’s “Frontend Engineering”, you ask?

Frontend Engineering

Anyone who is advocating Frontend Engineering is essentially recommending an approach that emphasizes skillfully and artfully designing or building the user interface layer of a Web site or Web application (actually engineering it). That would be anything and everything that is sent to the Web browser: typically this is (X)HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. Extending this definition it can mean anything that is involved in the logical construction or output of these technologies as well as how they’re sent to the browser, via server-side code, Web server configuration, or from a Web Content Management System (WCMS).

To do this in a skillful and artful manner really just means deliberately planning and structuring these technologies in an intelligent and beneficial way, rather than thoughtlessly tossing things up online. Typically this means having a dedicated staff of Frontend Engineers that are experts. These folks know the ins and outs of browsers and work with the designers and application developers to deploy these technologies effectively. Browsers are an inconsistent and sometimes unpredictable environment to work in, so it’s not always easy.

Nate’s presentation describes the different aspects involved in Frontend Engineering in a highly effective way.

Incidentally, this is the approach we take at NavigationArts.