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> What does a frontend dev actually do that’s so different from a backender? Deal with and pre-empt cross-browser compatibility issues, ensure accessibility, i
by Vinnl 6y ago
> What does a frontend dev actually do that’s so different from a backender?
Deal with and pre-empt cross-browser compatibility issues, ensure accessibility, iterate on the UX, deal with stateful-but-not-persisted applications, optimise for constrained devices whose hardware you do not control... And keep up with whatever technologies exist to help with those challenges.
The article even mentions some of these. Yes, you could just say back-enders should know about all that, but... There's a limit to how far a single human can vertically integrate their knowledge. For example, the same argument could be used to claim that 'developers' should be able to handle all the challenges of the back-end, of database adminstration, of operations, and why not, let's throw in business development, design and content strategy as well.
In the end, it mostly depends on what you can afford. If you're a small, bootstrapped startup, you have a couple of people doing everything. But as you grow, specialisation can become more efficient.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> deal with stateful-but-not-persisted applications No, they don't. The application is persisted. The store is one or more external resources, but that's usually the case with persistence, even on the backend.
- allover 6y agoParent is simply referring to the front-end skill of building an app with rich client-side state that isn't persisted to a backend DB.
- Vinnl 6y agoThat's right, though I do see how my original formulation didn't make that terribly clear. Thanks for clarifying it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Parent is simply referring to the front-end skill of building an app with rich client-side state that isn't persisted to a backend DB. Frequently some or all of the state is persisted to a datastore, whether client-side or backend (which of those isn't really a substantive difference in the skill involved, except that backend stores make planning around communication failures more important), and even when it's not, “my internal data structures don't also get loaded from and saved to an external store” doesn’t add any additional required skill, it strictly reduces the set of skills that need to be applied.
- Vinnl 6y agoWorking with partially-completed forms is a completely different type of state management than storing and loading state from a datastore.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]