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Biggest myth I have ever heared. Only because someone can write frontend JS, doesn't mean he can understand backend logic and actually write proper backend code

by nik736 10y ago

Biggest myth I have ever heared. Only because someone can write frontend JS, doesn't mean he can understand backend logic and actually write proper backend code. Also, if you are a 1-2 person team and using a frontend JS MVC framework in 95% of all cases you are doing it wrong.

mpfundstein 10y ago
I agree. Backend and Software are two different worlds. At least if you want to get both right :-) But!!! If you have the same language in both, its easier to check the code of the over side and derive some insights, or to eventually fix some small bug somewhere or implement a minor feature. I experience that currently.
Eridrus 10y ago
Not all projects require "proper backend code" whatever that means. It's not my team, but our enterprise/analytics dashboard is written in Node; we've been fine with 2 developers on that team for 3 years. It doesn't receive a tonne of traffic since it's largely just interactive reports for our users and the actually complicated parts are handled by a separate team that makes sure the relevant data lives in a Druid database that the dashboard team can query. The whole product started as a NodeJS+MongoDB app, which was a disaster at scaling to the billions of requests a day we handle and we've replaced it everywhere except the dashboard, but there is absolutely no incentive for replacing it there and when something truly tricky comes up there is support in the rest of the org for them; of course nothing stops them from writing a hair ball besides themselves, but that's always the case. You don't necessarily need to find someone who is only good at frontend code and throw them into a backend project, but if you find someone comfortable with Node, they're probably in that position because they also know how to do frontend, and once you have at least one senior Node developer, you can teach your frontend-only developers. Maybe I just don't have a good sense for the web developer market and there are a lot of backend+frontend people who are not Node developers, but my intuition tells me that's not the case.
caseymarquis 10y ago
"if you are a 1-2 person team and using a frontend JS MVC framework in 95% of all cases you are doing it wrong." You're saying having a small team makes it a bad idea to use a standard-ish library for organizing things and avoiding grunt work? I would argue the exact opposite.

by nik736 10y ago

mpfundstein 10y ago

I agree. Backend and Software are two different worlds. At least if you want to get both right :-) But!!! If you have the same language in both, its easier to check the code of the over side and derive some insights, or to eventually fix some small bug somewhere or implement a minor feature. I experience that currently.

Eridrus 10y ago

Not all projects require "proper backend code" whatever that means. It's not my team, but our enterprise/analytics dashboard is written in Node; we've been fine with 2 developers on that team for 3 years. It doesn't receive a tonne of traffic since it's largely just interactive reports for our users and the actually complicated parts are handled by a separate team that makes sure the relevant data lives in a Druid database that the dashboard team can query. The whole product started as a NodeJS+MongoDB app, which was a disaster at scaling to the billions of requests a day we handle and we've replaced it everywhere except the dashboard, but there is absolutely no incentive for replacing it there and when something truly tricky comes up there is support in the rest of the org for them; of course nothing stops them from writing a hair ball besides themselves, but that's always the case. You don't necessarily need to find someone who is only good at frontend code and throw them into a backend project, but if you find someone comfortable with Node, they're probably in that position because they also know how to do frontend, and once you have at least one senior Node developer, you can teach your frontend-only developers. Maybe I just don't have a good sense for the web developer market and there are a lot of backend+frontend people who are not Node developers, but my intuition tells me that's not the case.

caseymarquis 10y ago

"if you are a 1-2 person team and using a frontend JS MVC framework in 95% of all cases you are doing it wrong." You're saying having a small team makes it a bad idea to use a standard-ish library for organizing things and avoiding grunt work? I would argue the exact opposite.