Front-End Engineers cannot be spoken about without mentioning browsers. The ubiquitous software that enables the world to interface with web applications; for developers, it is the platform in which front-end applications are built in, yet for most, the browser is a complex black-box with various unique quirks between the few widespread ones available, namely Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer/Edge.

When people ask what we do as Front End Engineers, the answer is often difficult to articulate without diluting the role itself. A typical answer could be "I build what you see on the web", or "I build user interfaces for the web".

With the recent news of technology firms (such as Google) being interrogated by the government, surrounding controversial issues including user privacy and the impact of algorithms (a set of rules defining how an application works), is it time for the tech giants of the world to explain how their platforms work?

Google’s ‘Planet’ [1], a firm in its Alphabet portfolio specialising in geospatial intelligence and monitoring of earth has recently announced a newly awarded contract to provide the US Government’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency [2] with planetary coverage of the earth