I’m an experienced backend developer. To me, the backend world seems super simple compared to the frontend world.
It seems like there are a million options and I don’t have the experience to say what’s good and what’s not. I’m hit with major choice paralysis, basically.
I don’t have any special requirements - I “just” want to build a pretty standard, responsive, modern-looking UI. Ideally without too much boilerplate, in a framework that “feels good”, in a way that might at some point attract other contributors as well, if I get to the point of open sourcing.
Of course I could just reach for the most popular thing i.e. React, but that doesn’t seem to be the “hip” thing to use nowadays (or maybe I’m wrong? What do I know, I’m a backend dev).
But even if I choose a framework, there’s a million other libraries out there to choose as well. For instance, which UI library to choose? What about observability and state management and authentication and so on?
Sorry if this is a bit ranty. I am honestly just looking for an experienced frontend developer to point me in some direction (i.e. some set of frameworks/libraries; a “stack” if you will), so I can get out of this choice paralysis.
What would be your go-to stack for a new frontend project today?
Well there is no silver bullet. My two cents is React, but that drives people nuts. Pick one of the big three (React, Angular, and Vue) and then start practicing.
Could you elaborate on why you think it drives people nuts? And why you are recommending it despite that? Genuine questions, just looking for some reasoning as I have no intuition in this area myself.
The negative feedback I get from more engineer minded people (I’m more design minded) is that the library is bloated and its features are convoluted. When it first came out and it was completely class based components that was confusing to me. Now the library is focused on functional components which makes it more intuitive in my opinion. With that said React is my bread and butter.
I’m definitely more engineer-minded, but that is another thing I’m having to deal with in my frontend journey here 😅. Figuring out how to code a UI is one thing, but figuring out what the UI should even look like to begin with is a whole other thing. A thing I’m very uncertain about still. Were you always design-minded or was it something you learned? I feel like I was always engineer-minded and backend came very naturally to me.
I’m a visual thinker and I love art. I picked up coding 10 years ago for survival purposes (I’m currently unemployed). What you need to understand about frontend development is that everything being rendered on screen as DOM elements are fancy looking blocks on a grid. Key value pairs never go away, they just get a coat of paint. There are best practices such as making sure not to put #000000 text on a #ffffff background and some fancy CSS tricks to make things visually appealing. You need to translate brand guidelines and designs into variables so you can template out as much as you can for reusability. Using the ANDI browser extension will check your DOM for accessibility so people with screen readers and poor eye sight will be able to use your app.
Dear god someone give me a job.