I’m an experienced backend developer. To me, the backend world seems super simple compared to the frontend world.
It seems like there are a million options and I don’t have the experience to say what’s good and what’s not. I’m hit with major choice paralysis, basically.
I don’t have any special requirements - I “just” want to build a pretty standard, responsive, modern-looking UI. Ideally without too much boilerplate, in a framework that “feels good”, in a way that might at some point attract other contributors as well, if I get to the point of open sourcing.
Of course I could just reach for the most popular thing i.e. React, but that doesn’t seem to be the “hip” thing to use nowadays (or maybe I’m wrong? What do I know, I’m a backend dev).
But even if I choose a framework, there’s a million other libraries out there to choose as well. For instance, which UI library to choose? What about observability and state management and authentication and so on?
Sorry if this is a bit ranty. I am honestly just looking for an experienced frontend developer to point me in some direction (i.e. some set of frameworks/libraries; a “stack” if you will), so I can get out of this choice paralysis.
What would be your go-to stack for a new frontend project today?
Sorry, I should’ve made myself clearer. I am an experienced backend developer but I know basic HTML, CSS and JS/TS. My problem is not with learning the basics of these foundational technologies, or learning anything actually. My problem is what should I even learn and what is a good stack-choice, taking into account not just my own enjoyment and what is popular/cool, but futureproofing and maintainability as well. I don’t have time to go through all frontend frameworks. There are simply too many and it is not an exercise I find enjoyable.
What’s your goal?
I think building something with what you know should be a good start. Then look into the different frameworks and determine which is the best for your use case to convert it. Definitely overkill.
All that to say, just jump in and pick one.
Well there is no silver bullet. My two cents is React, but that drives people nuts. Pick one of the big three (React, Angular, and Vue) and then start practicing.
Could you elaborate on why you think it drives people nuts? And why you are recommending it despite that? Genuine questions, just looking for some reasoning as I have no intuition in this area myself.
The negative feedback I get from more engineer minded people (I’m more design minded) is that the library is bloated and its features are convoluted. When it first came out and it was completely class based components that was confusing to me. Now the library is focused on functional components which makes it more intuitive in my opinion. With that said React is my bread and butter.
I’m definitely more engineer-minded, but that is another thing I’m having to deal with in my frontend journey here 😅. Figuring out how to code a UI is one thing, but figuring out what the UI should even look like to begin with is a whole other thing. A thing I’m very uncertain about still. Were you always design-minded or was it something you learned? I feel like I was always engineer-minded and backend came very naturally to me.
I’m a visual thinker and I love art. I picked up coding 10 years ago for survival purposes (I’m currently unemployed). What you need to understand about frontend development is that everything being rendered on screen as DOM elements are fancy looking blocks on a grid. Key value pairs never go away, they just get a coat of paint. There are best practices such as making sure not to put #000000 text on a #ffffff background and some fancy CSS tricks to make things visually appealing. You need to translate brand guidelines and designs into variables so you can template out as much as you can for reusability. Using the ANDI browser extension will check your DOM for accessibility so people with screen readers and poor eye sight will be able to use your app.
Dear god someone give me a job.
As a frontend dev working my way to the backend, I would probably say a stack of React/Vue, Typescript, and SASS. These are industry standards (or at least, as standard as you can get with such a fractured ecosystem). And/or: learning the ins and outs of an ecommerce platform for theme development, like Shopify or BigCommerce. In terms of frameworks, I prefer Vue because it’s a little higher level than React and translated well from vanilla JS.
The most future proof web tech is not using frameworks and libraries at all.
Render native HTML controls.
I also assume it’s lower barrier than any of the libs and frameworks you could use, which is always a subset of web tech with the addition of their own concepts.
In that case just pick up something and find out for yourself what is relevant to you.
I am literally asking for help for that exact thing in this thread. I come here asking “What frameworks should I learn?” and your response is “just pick something yourself”? I mean why are you even writing this comment, this is the most irrelevant and useless response to my question I can imagine.
Sorry, if it sounded like you should do the work yourself. What I meant is that I’d advise you to not think too much about your first choice and instead pick up any framework just to get started. Just one of the most popular ones as a starting point. Eventually you’ll understand what you like and dislike about that framework and you’ll have a better practical understanding of your own requirements for a front-end framework. The differences are too specific to study and examine them on paper.