Top 7 Skills Frontend Developers Should Keep Eye on in 2021

Undoubtedly, frontend development is the hottest trend to be followed in 2021. Earlier, it was easy for frontend developers to build an interactive website with mere knowledge of technologies like HTML, CSS, and jQuery. But today, they’re facing a broad and constantly evolving ecosystem where developers need to educate themselves with new skills, tools, frameworks, and libraries to suffice the market demands.

The past 2020 has given us awesome new libraries and frameworks like VueJs, ReactJS that utilize JavaScript to empower major web apps.

So, what are those skills that Frontend developers need to focus on to deliver intuitive websites in 2021?

This article focuses to guide you on skills, technologies, and tools needed to learn as a front-end developer to level up your game in 2021. So, whether you’re an avid programmer or just a beginner, this piece of the guide will help you to triumph in business.

What should frontend developers learn in 2021?

Work on frameworks

The year 2021 has a huge bag of surprises hidden beneath. We can expect to see more duel between ReactJs and VueJS. The former framework holds around 1,59,000 stars on GitHub while the successor has 1,75,000 stars. In 2019, if we compare the search volume of the frontend frameworks, Vuejs was slightly at the top as compared to Reactjs.

So, if the front-end web developer is looking forward to working with JavaScript frameworks in 2021, they should keep more focus on React and Vue. Though Angular is the best framework to build enterprise-grade projects, you cannot deny the acceptance of React and Vue by a developer globally.

To learn more about these frameworks, you can go through the below resources:

React

Vue.js

Static site generator

Now harness the power of server-side rendering along with building single-page applications, with a Static site generator. With 2021 on road, the majority of the projects regardless of the need for server-side rendering are built using SSG. The reason behind this is they’re equipped with solutions like Next. It comes along with a wide range of features such as module bundlers, integrated test runners, markdown support, and more.

So, if you are serious about your career in frontend development, you can take a close look at the below projects to get some hands-on experience:

1. Gatsby (React based project)
2. Gridsome(Vue based project)
3. Next(React based project)

GraphQL

Despite the fact that REST has been considered as a de facto standard to build web APIs by web developers because of offering stateless servers. However, RESTful API’s are considered more insignificant and inflexible when it comes to dealing with rapidly changing business requirements.

To cope up with the current issue, Facebook launched GraphQL so that developers can tackle the issue dealt with RESTful APIs.

When working with REST APIs, the front-end react developer needs to accumulate data by fetching it from multiple endpoints. But with GraphQL. Things work differently. Here, developers simply need to run a query to the GraphQL server with data requirements. The server in return would reply with a JSON object with all the corresponding data.

Since GraphQL uses a strong type system, everything on the GraphQL server will be defined via schema definition language (SDL). Once the schema is created, both the front-end and back-end developers can work independently since they’re aware of the basic structure.

Git and version control system

Git is the most standard version control system that lets you keep track of the changes been made in the coding structure over a period of time.

It also makes it easy to revert to the earlier versions in case of any misfortune. You can simply roll back to the previous versions and can fix all the errors. Git is one of the most vital skills for frontend developers that they should learn in 2021.

Testing and Debugging

Testing and Debugging are one of the most vital factors for front-end developers without which they cannot survive.

Though you may not undergo testing in personal projects, it is mandatory to integrate testing in commercial and enterprise projects. You can perform testing in the below ways:

Unit testing:

Here, testing is conducted for a single component or function.

Integration testing:

This testing is an interaction between components.

End-to-end testing:

It is all about testing user workflows in the browser.

Apart from this, there are multiple testing ways including manual testing, snapshot testing, etc. So, if you’re looking forward to front end angular developer at a senior position, make sure they possess these skills.

Cross-browser development

Though modern browsers render the websites consistently still there is a huge difference in how they interpret the codes behind the scene. Until all the modern browsers work correctly with the web standards. It’s quite hard to know each of them and that’s where cross-browser development comes into the scene.

Novice developers should understand that building cross-browser web apps is the need of an hour and it is one of the most unavoidable factors to build scalable apps.

Learn JAMstack

The term JAMstack stands for JavaScript, API and Markup used to build websites and applications for better performance and lower down the scaling cost and thus provide higher security with better developer experience.

Top-notch enterprises and larger applications rely heavily on JAMstack to deliver a great experience to its users. 

So, that’s all about what aspiring front-end developers should learn in 2021. None of these matters if you aren’t well-versed with JavaScript. So, before getting started with the above, make sure you are pro at JavaScript development.

Looking forward to hiring the best frontend developer in 2021? 

If you’re looking forward to building your next front-end web app, you can hire React developer from top front-end development companies like Concetto Labs and get your web app developed at an affordable cost. The company has a decade of experience in building top-notch high-performing apps for startups, businesses, and leading enterprises globally. 

All you need to do is just drop us your business requirements and we will get back to you with project estimation in 48 business working hours.