As a backend person, sometimes I look at what's being done for front end stuff and pull back in ever so slight horror.
It's an excellent article, and the work within is very well done, but there's a part of me that screams "Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?" (overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result aside).
Frontend is completely inaccessible to me.
From time to time I dip my toe in and try new things, but as productive as I can get with Astro, the illusion vanishes as soon as I have to understand any of the plumbing.
Fortunately, I can still party like it’s 1999 just fine: just yesterday, I worked on a janky brutalist web app (the same way I did back in 2002, cribbing from the O’Reilly “Dynamic HTML: the Definite Reference”) and “deployed” it with rsync to pico.sh. It’s practically unstyled and I didn’t even use jquery, but it works.
The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database. You need to process a bunch of strings for similarity? We got an algorithm for that.
But frontend stuff is messy. How do you tell a person what they're trying to do is wrong and they need to change their inputs? Oh, maybe we can highlight the input or we can pop a modal message. Haha, psyche! Users ignore that shit! Now what you gonna do, buddy?
Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.
Contempt for your users inevitably leads to bad products so it’s no wonder things are bad if this is the prevalent attitude among front end web developers.
There's a difference between contempt (i.e. "users are stupid") and realism, though. And realism can range from "users don't want to troubleshoot" to "some users are near-violently anti-tech and won't read errors", depending on context.
The unfortunate truth is that if you're doing B2C or even B2B outside of tech companies, the second one will often come up...
Bad devs exist. Bad users do too. Thing is, you can't usually fire the bad users.
> And realism can range from "users don't want to troubleshoot" to "some users are near-violently anti-tech and won't read errors", depending on context.
No dude, I have things to do and your little software is a tiny roadblock in my day. I dont want to become a fellow expert in your niche, do the thing and get out of my way.
Building UI for work and for consumers is completely different. I’ve done both, user attitudes are veeeery different. Building an ecommerce page is also very different to building an engagement trap for users to sit in.
Problems start when engineers/designers/producters don’t understand their users and their goals. Or when the user is not also the customer (this is the worst)
There's a third category too, users looking for security weakness and probing the system with a spectrum of inputs. The response to these inputs can reveal a lot about how the backend is designed.