Sure, it's also what we call a fullstack developer ;)
Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#12With the rise of single page applications there is immense demand for the rigor and form that seasoned back-end developers can bring to front-end teams.
Immense state trees, webworkers, asynchronous changes, tiered caching, pre-emptive fetching, modularization, optimistic rendering, validation, behavioral analytics, testing and more.
This is all without even getting started on actual presentational aspects.
The pace of the ecosystem in recent years and the immense amount of legacy code (10 years+) that doesn't scale to growing teams/projects is a problem everywhere you look.
The good news is companies looking to bring their front-end up to date are facing the same foreboding sense you have that comes with the unfamiliar.
Fragmentation is coalescing around major frameworks and fringe features from a few years ago are standards today.
It's not too late, understanding the tooling is critical (end-to-end IDE through to the browser and beyond) and will provide you with a solid basis. Follow this up by reading the APIs of major frameworks then pick one (any one, it doesn't matter) and build something with it.
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#13From my very limited view in my opinion it's not worth it. There is an abundance of new frameworks and libraries and everybody wants to go for the "new cool thing". Things break a lot, things change fast and you need to always learn new stuff which are not necessarily better. It seem annoying and overkill to keep up with everything in the front-end world. Plus, there are no interesting problems to solve there.
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#14With the rise of single page applications there is immense demand for the rigor and form that seasoned back-end developers can bring to front-end teams. Immense state trees, webworkers, asynchronous changes, tiered caching, pre-emptive fetching, modularization, optimistic rendering, validation, behavioral analytics, testing and more. This is all without even getting started on actual presentational aspects. The pace…
Thanks! This is super useful and inspiring.
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#15With the rise of single page applications there is immense demand for the rigor and form that seasoned back-end developers can bring to front-end teams. Immense state trees, webworkers, asynchronous changes, tiered caching, pre-emptive fetching, modularization, optimistic rendering, validation, behavioral analytics, testing and more. This is all without even getting started on actual presentational aspects. The pace…
You should take the advice of this comment. The reason there are many moving parts is that the space is retooling to push the limits of what is possible. If you enjoy learning and solving problems, it's great.
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#16From my very limited view in my opinion it's not worth it. There is an abundance of new frameworks and libraries and everybody wants to go for the "new cool thing". Things break a lot, things change fast and you need to always learn new stuff which are not necessarily better. It seem annoying and overkill to keep up with everything in the front-end world. Plus, there are no interesting problems to solve there.
Why give throwaway advice? "I don't really know the space, but here's what you should do..."
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#17I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare.
Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and an unhealthy worship of Google and Facebook.
No offence intended to Javascript programmers -- I just don't like frontend development.
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#18Should you gain more experience with front-end, especially Javascript? Yes.
Should you change career paths to front-end? Absolutely not. Front-end is just that; web development. With Java and Ruby experience, you're not stuck to just web development but can branch off into other fields much easier.
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#19A bigger question would be are you willing to take a step back. In your previous role you were probably fairly senior developer. Moving to the frontend you'll probably be more junior are you okay with that change?
Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?
#20From my very limited view in my opinion it's not worth it. There is an abundance of new frameworks and libraries and everybody wants to go for the "new cool thing". Things break a lot, things change fast and you need to always learn new stuff which are not necessarily better. It seem annoying and overkill to keep up with everything in the front-end world. Plus, there are no interesting problems to solve there.
Why give throwaway advice? "I don't really know the space, but here's what you should do..."
Did I say I don't know the space? Does it sound like I never did front-end development? You should learn how to parse properly. I tried it, it sucks, and that's why.