Tim,
It'd be great to hear more about what your company thinks the "devops way" is.
If we look back in history, the first software engineers actually were operators as well (the women who programmed the ENIAC without any kind of manuals because hardware engineers were basically 'We built it, you figure it out'). Over time as computers became ubiquitous and affordable to everyone, software engineering broke out into specializations like system administration, system operators, and developers. Where once the hardware engineers were pushing the responsibilities on to software engineers, now the developers were doing the same to the other specializations. This led to some increased silos due to organizational structures and the ever increasing battles for budgets. System administration specialized into network, operating systems, security, and database administration. Development has specialized into hardware, front end, back end, quality assurance development just to name a few! As we see the specialization because each of the components become more complex we see more siloization.
So what does DevOps have to do for any of these groups? Bringing us back together to find the common grounds and the differences in our specializations that help us inform how we do our jobs for the better of the organization. We can see how some of the benefits of coding has been shared with operations folks in advancements such as infrastructure as code. With development, qa, and operations folks working together we can see continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment become possible.
What does DevOps specifically have to do with front-end development? From what I've seen, to some degree the siloization is still happening and many front-end developers don't think they are part of devops even though devops with front-end AND back-end development at Flickr with operations was the key point that started the drive for cooperation and collaboration between groups because the magical outcome of 10 deploys was possible when these parties were on the same page! Key elements like defining your sandbox environment with abstractions that are provided with
test kitchen, vagrant or cloud provisioning, and chef for example will allow a front-end developer to write deployments that can easily be deployed to OS platforms of ubuntu OR centos locally or into systems hosted in AWS or Digital Ocean without changing the code.
The impact means faster delivery of code into environments where customers can see the benefits and changes more quickly. Often this leads to a change from trying to get the code out to be seen, and more about the ability to choose when those changes get deployed because it's possible to do the deployments so quickly.