That CSS is the most complex modern programming language
So true.
It's a little bit like voodoo sometimes. I can see why a lot of people rather do back-end. I learnt much most of what I know about CSS from StackOverflow than from books, good thing now there's MDN. Not entirely sure where to start when juniors ask me "how do I learn CSS".
Coding is as much a matter of personal growth as it is of logic and control-flow. I keep patience, curiosity, & exuberance in the same toolbox as vim and git.
*Opinions posted are my own*
That not all software engineering roles have the same cachet in the eyes of the local culture. (Alternatively: that good frontend and test automation specialists are grossly undervalued.)
Yes! There is a weird relationship between these two observations: building cross-browser UIs and writing solid CSS is hard, and yet some places in the industry doesn't seem to value frontend engineers as much as backend engineers.
I wonder if there is something about how good UIs are, at its core, a more people-centric part of the software and, as such, are somehow seen "less technical" and thus less valuable. Point #8 in the list all over again! 🤔
I decided to subvert this trope and became a front-end engineer after years of desktop and back-end development. And indeed I discovered a few things.
Most programmers don't believe they need a front-end. Only market-oriented project managers do.
The perceived lack of appreciation often stems from dire shortage of competent UI specialists. Programming "in jQuery" is easy, but writing good, efficient, responsive, intuitive and resilient UI is just as thought-intensive as implementing a complex algorithm. And, unfortunately, 99%* prospective employees can't handle simple asynchronous funnels without drowning in callback hell. It's a skill best acquired writing multi-threaded C code, which most front-end developers never did.
The salary is often low when the management compares expectations of a competent engineer with the aforementioned 99%, which know not to ask for much.
In the end, that's why only a few companies have products with stellar UI. And this spark is lost the moment some new "efficient manager" decides to outsource or otherwise downplay the importance of good UI.
based on personal experience interviewing people. yes, it's that bad.
Yeah, interviewing for front end engineers is really tricky. I mostly ask for code walkthrough of portfolio projects, but most don't have the complexity of real world projects.
And you're right, there's a lot of async logic going on on the UI for complex apps. In my experience, that's hard to grapple for a lot of programmers, frontend and backend. And before modern frameworks like React, Vue, making sure the the UI properly handles update events being dispatched from multiple sources, resolving race conditions, and updating the view correctly is difficult, it was hard not to end up with spaghetti code. It's a good thing I learnt to do a bit of video game programming in a side project, and took some of lessons learned there and applied it to front-end engineering on the web. Video games UIs are super sophisticated, but proper modelling of object and events can go a long way in to keeping things sane and maintainable. At least now we have modern frameworks to help.
People who say frontend is easy are usually thinking it's just HTML but that's not true. There's security, storage, cache management, performance, user experience and much more to deal with.
People who say frontend is easy are usually thinking it's just HTML but that's not true. There's security, storage, cache management, performance, user experience and much more to deal with.
That is true, but at least 95% of all web applications do not need this. I’ve worked on a couple that had really complex React front ends that absolutely did not require them. It just resulted in hard to maintain code, all because management wanted to use a hip framework.
There is probably only one author who tries to explain the voodoo of CSS logically, from the specs - and that's Eric Meyer. I liked his book "CSS: The definitive guide" a lot, but it used to not cover the newer css stuff (probably the newer version does to some extent).
I would definitely like a solid chapter (or blog or whatever, with Eric Meyer-ish details) on flexbox and CSS grids.
So true.
It's a little bit like voodoo sometimes. I can see why a lot of people rather do back-end. I learnt much most of what I know about CSS from StackOverflow than from books, good thing now there's MDN. Not entirely sure where to start when juniors ask me "how do I learn CSS".
Try Shadow DOM. It eats compound selectors for breakfast.
Lets Build Web Components! Part 1: The Standards
Benny Powers
Totally.
Yes! There is a weird relationship between these two observations: building cross-browser UIs and writing solid CSS is hard, and yet some places in the industry doesn't seem to value frontend engineers as much as backend engineers.
I wonder if there is something about how good UIs are, at its core, a more people-centric part of the software and, as such, are somehow seen "less technical" and thus less valuable. Point #8 in the list all over again! 🤔
I decided to subvert this trope and became a front-end engineer after years of desktop and back-end development. And indeed I discovered a few things.
Most programmers don't believe they need a front-end. Only market-oriented project managers do.
The perceived lack of appreciation often stems from dire shortage of competent UI specialists. Programming "in jQuery" is easy, but writing good, efficient, responsive, intuitive and resilient UI is just as thought-intensive as implementing a complex algorithm. And, unfortunately, 99%* prospective employees can't handle simple asynchronous funnels without drowning in callback hell. It's a skill best acquired writing multi-threaded C code, which most front-end developers never did.
The salary is often low when the management compares expectations of a competent engineer with the aforementioned 99%, which know not to ask for much.
In the end, that's why only a few companies have products with stellar UI. And this spark is lost the moment some new "efficient manager" decides to outsource or otherwise downplay the importance of good UI.
Yeah, interviewing for front end engineers is really tricky. I mostly ask for code walkthrough of portfolio projects, but most don't have the complexity of real world projects.
And you're right, there's a lot of async logic going on on the UI for complex apps. In my experience, that's hard to grapple for a lot of programmers, frontend and backend. And before modern frameworks like React, Vue, making sure the the UI properly handles update events being dispatched from multiple sources, resolving race conditions, and updating the view correctly is difficult, it was hard not to end up with spaghetti code. It's a good thing I learnt to do a bit of video game programming in a side project, and took some of lessons learned there and applied it to front-end engineering on the web. Video games UIs are super sophisticated, but proper modelling of object and events can go a long way in to keeping things sane and maintainable. At least now we have modern frameworks to help.
People who say frontend is easy are usually thinking it's just HTML but that's not true. There's security, storage, cache management, performance, user experience and much more to deal with.
That is true, but at least 95% of all web applications do not need this. I’ve worked on a couple that had really complex React front ends that absolutely did not require them. It just resulted in hard to maintain code, all because management wanted to use a hip framework.
There is probably only one author who tries to explain the voodoo of CSS logically, from the specs - and that's Eric Meyer. I liked his book "CSS: The definitive guide" a lot, but it used to not cover the newer css stuff (probably the newer version does to some extent).
I would definitely like a solid chapter (or blog or whatever, with Eric Meyer-ish details) on flexbox and CSS grids.
Ooo, shall check that out! 👍