Software development topics I've changed my mind on

> Frontend development is a nightmare world of Kafkaesque awfulness I no longer enjoy

My feeling is that a lot of negativity towards the frontend stems from assuming that the entire field is like React and its community. It's really not like that.

I think Frontend (or maybe slightly expanded App Development) is a greatly underappreciated skill. It's easy to throw a UI together, but to do it in a way that is obvious to your user's, can be maintained and can move at the speed the business needs is a tough ask.

The much bigger problem is that you not only have to deal with the technical challenges, but also the visual design challenges where non-technical people have all kinds of opinions that you have to deal with. Things get really nasty once you have to implement features that emulate non-web functionality like right-click menus and the UI becomes an inconsistent mess.

Visual Design Challenges is one I hear most frontend developer complain about. I explained a queen duck (https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/) to one of them and he started doing that several times in his project. If you look at this git repo, there would be commits called "queen duck" right before he would demo so he could get feedback about the "mistake" he made, revert the commit and move on with his life.

I agree, getting all the pieces together and having it be maintainable and enjoyable to work on is part of the craft.

I enjoy the challenge, and have found a great niche for myself doing exactly that.