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Hundreds of thousands of daily active users, I built both the backend and the mobile app. I think I'm familiar with common problems on both sides. Trust me, dea
by mojuba 5y ago
Hundreds of thousands of daily active users, I built both the backend and the mobile app. I think I'm familiar with common problems on both sides. Trust me, dealing with UI platforms is orders of magnitude more pain in the arse if you set the quality standards to the highest. Even the codebases were approx. 1 to 20-25.
- valenterry 5y agoA big difference still stays: a frontend (and that includes SPAs, mobile apps and desktop applications) is essentially restarted all the time. If I screw something up in the frontend, then in most cases, I can fix it and people use the new version / reload the page and that's it. In backend, if I screw up, in most cases I now have a data problem and an ongoing problem that might only be fixable through an operational update. I might even have lost/overwritten data that is not recoverable or only through backups. Sure, this can happen on the frontend too (e.g. sending a wrong update command to the backend API or when storing some data/configuration directly in the browser) but from my experience it is much much more likely to happened in the backend and if it does, it is more severe. This doesn't make things more difficult on the technical side per se, but it slows things down a lot. I can't count how often I wished to be able to just truncate all user data and start with a fresh plate, instead of with a long, messed up user data history that contains quirks, fixes/workarounds in the data and that I have to stay compatible with and not forget.