Does a front-end developer need to know back-end technologies to work on a site? [closed]

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22597497

Question

Scenario: someone only knows design, CSS, HTML etc. and you want that person to work on a website. The website's files are on GitHub.

Ideally you say to them, "clone the repo from GitHub and set up you local testing environment etc, do your work and push/pull-request etc."

But to set up a local environment, e.g. including MySQL so the dev environment can properly run, means they need to understand back-end technology. Does that mean they then need to understand how to configure every (or most) PHP framework + Ruby on Rails etc. Where would it stop?

So, how would a front-end developer work based on this?

Could a frontend developer ever work on a Symfony2 site without knowing how to configure Symfony2?

Was it helpful?

Solution

The options basically boil down to either:

  • Having them work on static files which then get integrated by a backend developer (only really a reasonable option if you are farming out frontend work to a design agency without having them perform ongoing maintenance).
  • Someone else setting up a development environment for them
  • Having them setting up the dev environment while making it as easy as possible for them

The latter approach would typically involve clear, step-by-step instructions and a virtual machine image that comes largely preconfigured, possibly combined with a tool like vagrant or salt stack.

OTHER TIPS

You can set up a VM with vagrant and get a consistent development environment.

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