Svelte 5 Released

Where would one even start learning more about front-end development in today's world? Ignoring the dizzying amount of frameworks, how could I become knowledgeable enough to connect my back-end experience to design the "full stack?"

I just ignore the whole “frontend stack”. I would suggest to stick with traditional server side rendering and for interactivity use htmx/alpinejs.

Pick a stack and dive into it. If you find yourself getting analysis paralysis, just pick one arbitrarily; you're not getting married, you're just getting started. Make things and get feedback on them.

At the end of that process you'll have the background to reevaluate your decisions.

I think truly full stack is probably too much to ask: just accessibility is a huge area of knowledge, for example. I can fiddle around with back-ends, but I want someone more experienced to check my work or just directly help out with e.g. scaling or observability.

That said, if you truly want to learn, MDN is the reference, and they have a pretty good curriculum too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/curriculum/

Also, ignore the dizzying amount of frameworks. Learn web technologies, and then React. There are millions of back-end tools as well, but in practice, you only use a limited set. Front-end is the same.

Play around with some stuff and see what works for you best. Personally, I didn’t get frontend at all before React came by, and then switched to Svelte because it fits my mental model exactly.

If you don’t like anything – no worries! Classic SSR with templates and stuff is a thing too, as another commenter pointed out.

Edit: no matter what, make sure you write good HTML first and foremost. Use proper semantic tags, don’t add dozens of nested divs, use native controls when possible etc. Make sure to check accessibility, but it should be OK if you don’t do any weird stuff. MDN is a great starting point.

Just choose one.

The minimum to be a broadly employable frontend dev is to have knowledge HTML + CSS + JavaScript/TypeScript + React/Vue.

Svelte is pretty niche. I'm not saying you shouldn't learn it, but that you should focus on the common tools first. This is just like you might tell a friend learning programming to learn Java/Python/Go etc. before getting into Lisp/Haskell/Prolog.

All are useful and have their place, but one set of languages is definitely more likely to be used in a workplace (unless you're lucky!).

If you want my opinion on a cool/trendy framework to use, I really like Astro [0], but, again, I doubt anyone will hire you unless you also have experience in React/similar.

[0]: https://astro.build/

React is still the most popular framework by a good margin. If your goal is to find work I'd start there, love it or not.

Just write Vanilla JS honestly. It's probably enough

Would you use Astro for other type of sites apart from static ones?

I'm not sure if I understand well its use case. It's not for cases when there's complex backend logic, right? What other technologies can be replaced by Astro, to have an example?

Astro is _really_ great for static sites. It doesn't feel heavy like Gatsby and Hugo do. I understand what's going on and I get to write JSX that compiles to static HTML.

> What other technologies can be replaced by Astro, to have an example?

As I mentioned above, and you hit on this too, I think Astro can replace static site generators. It wouldn't replace React (or your favorite framework), but it would use those frameworks to reduce your overall reliance on JavaScript and let most of your site be static HTML.

Astro has "island" pattern which allows you to selectively use JS frameworks on portions of pages where interactivity is required. You can use React, Vue, Svelte, etc.

The big benefit of islands is that the majority of your site is static HTML and only the bits of each page that actually need JS rely on it vs React where your entire site would use JS.

I haven't used this feature but I have heard that people really like it.

https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/islands/

I am an amateur but the reason I love React is because there is so much learning material. Robin Wieruch's The Road To Learn React book started with building a HN reader.

I think Claude/ChatGPT works exceptionally well with React code.

I tried to learn Svelte but React/Tailwind plus a language model is just incredible.

Much React hate I think is the way I view the band Metallica. They were way cooler in my head when they were not as popular.