Post | mennovanslooten.nl/blog

Peter Paul Koch, famous worldwide for his QuirksMode website and JavaScript book has recently initiated an effort to create a Dutch Guild for Front-End ⁽¹⁾ programmers. The goal of this effort is to increase professionalism among our Dutch colleagues. Today he went public and calls for action to spread the word and join the movement.

Some people may wonder why a movement like this is necessary. PPK feels that the profession of front-end programmer is not taken seriously enough. It's not taken seriously by the companies that assign this job to the designer or database coder that is least unwilling to do it and it's not taken seriously by the educational organisations who fail to give students the foundations and skills demanded by the professional world. I joined the effort recently because I mostly agree with these arguments.

Plans are not very concrete at the moment but we know we want to create some sort of certification process for members to indicate a certain level of skill. Not only could this act as an indication for employers, chances are it will be supported by both the government as well as the Platform for Dutch Internet Bureau's, who's site is interestingly enough a reminder of how bad things can be.

However well intended, it's going to be interesting to see if the Dutch experts that are involved will be able to play nice and agree upon the standards that will become the yardstick for our profession. In my experience, front-end programmers are extremely headstrong, overconfident about their own abilities and very critical of each other's skills. Or maybe that's just me and everyone else is really nice.

(1) Front-end here means HTML, CSS, JavaScript and, to a lesser extent, Flash.