Simon Willison’s Weblog

What specific skills are most important in a front-end web developer and in a back-end web developer?

8th December 2011

My answer to What specific skills are most important in a front-end web developer and in a back-end web developer? on Quora

Understanding of web app security. If they don’t know what XSS, CSRF and clickjacking are I’d be worried.

Posted 8th December 2011 at 12:47 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Video + notes on upgrading a Datasette plugin for the latest 1.0 alpha, with help from uv and OpenAI Codex CLI - 6th November 2025
Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex - 6th November 2025
A new SQL-powered permissions system in Datasette 1.0a20 - 4th November 2025

This is What specific skills are most important in a front-end web developer and in a back-end web developer? by Simon Willison, posted on 8th December 2011.

recruiting 8 webapps 44 web-development 169 quora 1005 frontend 19

Next: What are the best practices in Node.js to communicate with an existing Java backend?

Previous: What are good 2012 Technology Conferences in US for Programmers?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe