I have been a software engineer for a while and have focused mostly on backend development.
During that journey, I have dabbled in frontend work. To be honest I never really liked it.
I started my career as a system administrator, so I learnt about the Unix philosophy early on. So scripting and using the shell became my bread and butter.
Anyway back to why I didn’t like it. Well because to me any user interface should be a simple terminal. I know this is a simplification. However, this has always left me with the following thoughts.
While I generally prefer using IDLs, when I came across REST it was an excellent way forward with designing APIs, especially with the Maturity Model.
For some reason, the frontend went the opposite way by building rich clients. While sometimes that might be needed (native), this is not how the web was born. We have to look at the humble beginnings of Hypertext and Hypermedia.
This is why I lost interest as I just didn’t agree with it, the internet is full of such arguments. Denial is strong with some.
A few weeks ago I started noticing more discussions by a former Delivery Hero colleague, with his journey in building an Observability Platform, do check it out he has some awesome views.
With these views, it led me to get acquainted with Hypermedia Systems. This is brought to you by the same people who came up with HTMX, do check out their views at https://htmx.org/essays/
I love the motto from https://bigsky.software/
“We find hot new trends in the industry and then build the opposite of that”
I must say this gave me a breath of fresh air and has got me excited to look at this. Another area was styling and I found Pico and lightweight JavaScript using Alpine.
So wish me luck when a backend engineer gets excited about the frontend again.