This is a great passage from Coyier:
The most important aspect of the job? The people that use these browsers. That’s why we’re building things at all. These are the people I’m trying to impress with my mad CSS skills. These are the people I’m trying to get to buy my widget. Who all my business charts hinge upon. Whose reaction can sway my emotions like yarn in the breeze. These users, who we put on a pedestal for good reason, have a much wider landscape than the browsers do. They speak different languages. They want different things. They are trying to solve different problems. They have different physical abilities. They have different levels of urgency. Again, helping them is firmly in the hands of front-end developers. There is very little in between the characters we type into our text editors and the users for whom we wish to serve.
I love it.
Being a front-end developer puts us on the front lines between the thing we’re building and the people we’re building it for, and that’s a place some of us really enjoy being.
He manages to completely describe the UX side of frontend development — something I’ve seen a lot of “full stack” developers miss. Even the ones who are invested in the business and user goals usually fail to connect the dots on how directly their work contributes.
It’s not enough to make it look like the picture or make the links match the prototype. You have to care.