Types of web developers

- There are many roles that live under the web developer umbrella. A web developer builds and maintains content for the web, targeting different platforms, including the desktop, tablets, and handheld mobile devices. Front-end developers work with languages that render in the browser, which is also called a client. So front-end developers work primarily with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are known as front-end technologies because it represents what's in front of the user as they interact with a website. Some sites require a special server because certain content has to be customized for each user based on their data.

That type of development is called back-end development because most of the action is not happening in front of the user, but on a server in the background. Someone who works with all the different layers of web development is sometimes referred to as a full-stack developer. Realistically, all web developers have to have an understanding of the whole stack. A stack is the set of the tools, both front-end and back-end, that a company uses to build its web presence. A true full-stack developer is a unicorn among developers. They are very few and far between.

Now all developers are expected to know enough about front-end and back-end tools and then specialize on different parts of the process.