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I've worked in front end and backend systems. I've worked with extremely high scale web services at FAANG. I've made videogames, and done data processing pipel
by Pfhreak 6y ago
I've worked in front end and backend systems. I've worked with extremely high scale web services at FAANG. I've made videogames, and done data processing pipelines.
In general, I find that people will look at the domain outside of their area of expertise and say, "Holy shit, how do you work like this?" All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance.
I think the important thing to remember is that engineers are doing complex engineering at every layer of the stack. And that because of environment and targets they are building for, they've made some tradeoffs around their development.
- worble 6y ago>All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance. This is funny because waiting for typescript to build is probably double or even triple waiting for my .NET project to compile at this point. I swear it gets slower every update.
- Pfhreak 6y agoI'm not familiar with TS compile times, most of the engineers I know working on FE code use JS.
- robin21 6y agoYeh Babel and webpack blow out compile times to epic proportions. Any app that grows to a certain size will slow down to a crawl on incremental builds.
- astrod 6y agoThere has been some interesting tooling being written in Rust, swc[1] compiles very fast. Not quite production ready but getting there. [1]https://swc.rs/ https://swc.rs/
- esperent 6y agoTry esbuild. I thought the following benchmarks must be fake until I tried it myself. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/evanw/esbuild/master/images/benchmark.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/evanw/esbuild/master/image...
- robin21 6y agoI really can’t believe that. But I will try!
- pjmlp 6y agoThankfully on my projects FE and BE are separate builds, so I only do FE builds when needed, I save so much minutes.
- williamdclt 6y agoGenuine question: in what sort of setup do you have a single build for your frontend and backend?
- pjmlp 6y agoJEE and .NET, where the build takes care of handling JavaScript, CSS and HTML files, provided they are on the expected project layout structure. Naturally I am not doing SPAs in this case, just vanilla JS and web components. The FE/BE split builds are only in SPA projects, with BE being mostly about WebAPIs.
- systemvoltage 6y ago> All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance. This is a shocking argument coming from any front end dev. Since when is static type checking, working on serious big repositories that take time to compile, have proper architecture with hundreds if not thousands of programmers working on it comparable to 3 frontend folks working on a web application? There is so much wrong with this argument and haven't scratched the surface.
- ricardobeat 6y agoThat's an odd comment to make, you just inadvertently proved their point. Most large web products are serious (?), have 'proper architecture' and hundreds of frontend developers working on them. Google products, Spotify, AirBnB, JIRA/Atlassian, Booking.com, Trello, GitHub.. you name it. You may also notice TypeScript in the first paragraph of the report, which is a type checker and has been enjoying massive adoption.
- Pfhreak 6y agoNot 'his', 'their', but yes, I agree that the projects being done on the web are hugely complex these days and have a rich set of building, linting, releasing, testing, etc. tools.
- ricardobeat 6y agocorrected, thanks.
- Pfhreak 6y agoI think you have a fairly dated understanding of what front end is, it's scale, and the complexity of delivering an experience that's fast and well optimized. These days front end engineering can be every bit as rigorous and complex as back end engineering. The constraints are a bit different, and the environments are very different, but the scale and complexity of engineering is not.
- 6y ago