How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer

> HTML / CSS: You should know all of this, but back-end developers generally don't have to do most of the heavy lifting here. It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS and then the back-end devs can take it from there.

In an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, you can often end up with HTML templates and CSS stylesheets that might fit the bill visually but simply aren't fit for purpose in other ways. As developers we need to consider factors such as the behaviour of the page and maintainability of the system as a whole. A badly designed stylesheet may be brittle and resistant to change or may even do things in a way that is incompatible with the frameworks and tools that you are using, and many designers aren't even aware that such constraints exist, let alone what problems they may cause.

For example, I was once given a CSS stylesheet to work with (for which the client had paid quite a large sum of money) that declared as a block-level element. This caused no end of chaos when we had to use it along with ASP.NET validator controls on a WebForms page, which of course makes liberal use of tags for inline validation messages.

> MVCs like Rails/Django if you can't push that stuff to the client

Uh, how exactly would you push your API to the client?

Only learning new stuff is all fine and well until you're tasked with integrating systems and the other vendor provides a SOAP interface and a giant WSDL file for documentation. It's happened to me a lot of times, I can't imagine that I'm unique.

Learning and adapting is a great thing. However, history shows us that real progress is made by societies made up of co-operating specialist elements. One person can certainly be mediocre at the range from Photoshop through to MySQL and jQuery, resulting in a mediocre product. Masters, working together, at each discipline will result in a masterful product (at greater initial expense).

That was maybe true few years ago. But with the web of today with backend and frontend becomming more and more complicated, I personnaly found that expertise is more and more of required.

But more and more often, I have been ask to help on project for cleaning the mess.. Not that the tech team is bad but without real expertise in backend, frontend, db or operation.

I love doing the full stack and never stop to learn is great advice. But getting specialised and learning few things very well matter a lot as well otherwise you end been average in loads of things and don't have real value on the market.

Now it s matter of what you are building, web apps become much more complex but it's still a small part of web market.. Where website or webcampain still rules as main business but I m personnaly not interrest to build that.