Although front-end and back-end application development are two main building blocks, the specifics of each career path are quite contrasting.

Due to the absence of big changes in technology, the back-end structure of applications had a significantly higher progression over the UI and client side. However, the emergence of modern web browsers and mobile computing caused front-end application design to become a priority for development teams. That’s not to say that back-end application is less important, but front-end arose to such popularity that developers have created independent career paths around it.

So what are the work and career differences between front-end and their back-end colleagues?

Front-end developers emphasize the user experience, improving what an application’s users interact with. This practice often brings about a drive to design intuitive, functional, and refined apps. For the front end to properly function, the back end of an application must be adequately scalable and performant so that the front end can load fast and operate correctly.

In addition, the emergence of new trends around front-end has elevated what developers can accomplish but, at the same time, it complicated a previously simpler endeavor.

Front-end development has seen a bigger shift since the explosion of mobile apps and smart devices and as such, the developers are tasked with keeping the quality of the constantly evolving technologies.

Technologies such as jQuery and Angular have gained prominence as of late it’s becoming clear that these trend adoptions are likely to grow.

Associated front-end technologies: Angular, React, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3 and so on.

Back-end developers mainly focus on behind-the-scenes architecture. Among dealing with the server and databases, a big focus area is if the architecture can withstand a sudden increase in traffic.

Back-end developers build for scale. They are constantly thinking of system architecture optimization and monitoring server and database performance metrics.

The complexity of managing the back-end stack has vastly grown over the past decade. Technologies like Java 11, Spring-Boot, REST API, OAuth2, AMQP or Docker have entirely changed the way applications share and consume data.

Another impactful trend for back development is the advent of low-code development platforms which are of great benefit to qualified developers as it handles the rendering of applications, streamline back-end operations, and may also enable serverless computing.

Associated back-end technologies: Java, Python, PHP, C and so on.

At AXON Soft most developers are full-stack. Of course, each of them has a certain preference for front-end or back-end. No matter the path you choose, at AXON Soft we believe this is a good time to be a software developer.

Get in touch if you think a career in this area is your dream job!