You're a Real Frontend Developer Only If...

I was roaming around dev.to the other day, not looking for anything in particular, when I kept running into Hadil's posts: You're a Real JavaScript Developer Only If... and the TypeScript one. I read both nodding the whole way through, half laughing, half feeling personally attacked.

So I thought: why not a frontend version?

People think you become a frontend developer when you ship your first website.

Not really.

You become a real frontend developer the day you spend an hour fixing a bug that was never there.

Let me confess the silliest one first, so you feel better about yours.

🤦 The silliest mistake I've ever made

I was changing a button color. Simple. color: red. Refresh. Still blue.

So I changed it again. Refresh. Still blue.

I added !important. Blue. I made the selector more specific. Blue. I opened DevTools, inspected the button, and the styles looked correct, the button was clearly red in the panel, and clearly blue on the screen. I started questioning my eyes. Then my career.

Forty minutes in, I noticed the browser tab. I'd been staring at the deployed site the whole time. My local server was running in another tab, two windows over, sitting there, red, exactly as told.

That's it. That's the bug. A whole afternoon's worth of stress, fixed by looking at the correct tab.

So, you're a real frontend developer only if...

🎨 The CSS chapter

You've centered a div,
felt like a genius,
and after a weekend...
googling how to center a div again

You've fixed a layout with margin-top: -3px,
and quietly closed the file,
hoped that nobody notices.

You've added !important "just for now.",
planned to change it later,
But that later never came.

🔄 The "it was never broken" chapter

You've changed everything,
fixed nothing,
still not working,
and then a hard refresh
bl**dy Cache.

You've been on the wrong git branch the entire time.

You've added a console.log,
seen nothing,
and later realized that the function was never called.

📱 The "works on my machine" chapter

You've remembered Safari exists,
only after a client opened it.

You've blamed the backend for a bug that was,
on closer inspection, entirely you.

You've said "tiny CSS change" out loud
and lost the rest of the day to it.

🧠 The frontend energy

You've copied a Stack Overflow answer from 2015,
it worked,
and you didn't ask why.

You've left a // TODO: clean this up
and that is still there

You've opened a competitor's site "just to see how they did the header."

If you've done at least five of these…

👉 congratulations, you're a frontend developer.

If you've done most of them:

👉 you're a senior frontend developer who simply hasn't updated the title yet.

🤦 The silliest mistake I've ever made

🎨 The CSS chapter

🔄 The "it was never broken" chapter

📱 The "works on my machine" chapter

🧠 The frontend energy

Your turn 👇