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Why I'm excited about serverless as a frontend engineer

Tomasz Łakomy on May 23, 2020

Before we start - I'm working on https://cloudash.dev, a brand new way of monitoring serverless apps 🚀. Check it our if you're tired of switching b...

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Nicolus • May 24 '20

Before the node.js days working with backend was more or less a completely separate skillset than writing frontend code (e.g. PHP backend and jQuery-driven frontend)

That's true but I don't think that's true for the reasons implied.

In my opinion the "fontend" skillset has become closer to the backend skillset around the time where nodejs became popular, but that's not because you can code the backend with javascript, it's mostly because doing frontend work now involves a lot of the same logic that's needed for the backend.

If you'd asked an HTML/CSS/jQuery developer to build the PHP backend of an app 15 years ago, they would have had a very hard time. But now take a modern front-end developer who's building PWAs with Typescript : they already work with OOP, They use MVC, they know reactive programming, they've probably already used some SQL with an embedded SQLite database, maybe even an ORM... So if you suddenly ask them to write the backend (be it with PHP, NodeJS, Python or Go), they just have a new language/framework to learn but they already know most of the concepts.

Tomasz Łakomy • May 24 '20

Great point! I agree with you, those are kinda like two sides of the same coin imho :)

diek • May 25 '20

Hahahaha prefering an IE8 bug was awesome and funny. Sometimes i feel this way when i prefer one tech or stack xD it's nice to see that i am not alone.
Anyway, serverless is awesome, not only for frontend, for backend too, i love servers but removing all the config and upgrade/mantain is very powerfull.
For a frontend stack, i fell in love with cloudfront, if you don't know it yet , i recommend to look about it, it allows you to serve in the edge an static web site directly from the S3, almost configuring nothing, awesome for the spa bundles!

Bernard Baker • May 23 '20

Keep me posted on this 🧐

Tomasz Łakomy • May 23 '20 • Edited

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Bernard Baker • May 23 '20

Signed 📳

Jannik Wempe • Jun 17 '20

Just finished the egghead course. I love it! Well done! Just used plain CloudFormation template.yml syntax before, which is much more verbose and less intuitive. I'll try to use CDK in my next projects. Thanks!