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This is painfully visible in big web agencies with tons of clients. The flow of designs to be turned into code is relentless, it's almost like a factory. The
by jokethrowaway 5y ago
This is painfully visible in big web agencies with tons of clients.
The flow of designs to be turned into code is relentless, it's almost like a factory.
The reason this doesn't get solved is that you'll always need a developer to smooth the edges, making it responsive, check things work properly everywhere.
There is just too much cruft in the web for full proper automation and there are plenty of frontend developers who barely know how to code but knows how to write React component at a relatively low price.
For individual product companies the effort to create something like this would be too big. Adopting an emergent third party solution instead of throwing frontenders at the problem would be a risky proposition.
Agencies would be the perfect candidate for buying something like this but the cost of developers can easily be passed down to the customer - and if they're big enough to have a lot of clients, they make money because of their brand, not because they're particularly cheap.
I don't think we'll see a solution to this before General Artificial Intelligence; the incentives for building a custom solution for this problem are low and the cost is relatively high.
Maybe if the web as we know were to become simpler / standardised (imagine having native views with native components configured by web services, instead of the wild west of an html page) this could become doable.
- robertnowell 5y agoInteresting, do you have experience with web agency work? I've never thought about the challenges they face, but they must face this challenge all the time
- jokethrowaway 5y agoYes, I worked with some of them and I have close friends running them. They definitely have this problem all the time. Imagine having n PM from big brands who need to build some websites / landing pages and don't want to commit their own development resources (either they don't have them, or they do). Agencies generally have internal project managers to match the clients and extract requirements. A common pattern is to have some developers and designers on the payroll (but the pay is not great, it's hard to get good talent) and a few contractors you worked with on the side for more exotic projects (eg. if a client wants a 3d website). The designers come up with the designs. Sometimes the client will have their own design. Often times the design + some notes on the side can replace a standard requirements documents. After that the designs are sent to the developers who convert it into code and deploy, usually with some sort of CMS (WordPress is still pretty popular, Django as well). The project gets demoed and adjustments / bugfixing starts.