… Frontend development is not just development … In order to become a better frontend developer you don’t become a backend developer, you become a better designer and advocate for the user—in a sense of acquiring an understanding of design as well as empathy for users … Understand that frontend development goes beyond HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—not in the direction of where software development may want to have it, the backend, but towards the user: accessibility; performance; usability; design; information architecture; &c. pp.

Hear hear!
This great article about the craft of Frontend Development by Jens starts with a bang: Frontend development is a field that’s not unfamiliar with being misunderstood, and its value being underestimated or missed Oh yes. At first, FE was seen as some variation of Desktop Publishing. "Real" designers would ponder about the (visual) layout and someone "just have to program it". Fast forward a decade and a half, and now "real" developers just need someone to cobble together some markup to make their "webapps" shine.

Designers to the left of me, developers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you…