2mo ago

There be Gremlins in the Code

20 comments

Funny, most people I've talked to said that the backend code usually is better structured and written, while the frontend (web and games) was a hot mess
- Depends who's coding what. Since fullstack, ick, is the norm, backend coders forced to do frontend is the case that you've described. Frontend coders forced to do backend is the case in the comic.
- Yeah, that’s my experience. The backend is an environment you control completely and has well-defined inputs and outputs specifically designed to be handled by machines. Front end code changes on a whim, runs who the hell knows where, and has to look good doing it.
  
  In particular, frontend has to interact with humans, which is one hell of a messy API.
  
  Plus for the front most people use very unsafe languages and glued together frameworks (JavaScript, typescript, react, Vue etc), whereas on the backend we can use proper type-safe, compiled languages with better abstractions (rust, scala,...) with proper unit and integration tests.
  
  And, while tested to extreme limits, somehow the end user still finds ways to break it, creating more things haphazardly stuffed in
- My experience has often been that Business mostly cares about what they and their users can directly interact with (The FE) and don't really care about spending time and effort on the BE
  
  Management: "We're only going to hire 'full stack' devs from now on."
  Also Management: "Why is this page taking 37 seconds to load?"
  
  The security and permission layers for the API:
  
  Yes, but that also means backend developers only have to worry about the code. Where I work, they always align on best practices across the company. While frontend is a mess of apps and frankensteined components.
- A significant percentage of developers regard frontend dev as a branch of the Arts, and therefore not "proper" software engineering.
  I once had a fresh grad Junior complain to me about being given a frontend ticket, because they wanted to be writing Real Code and apparently thought they were too good to learn how to change the margin on a div.
  
  Saying “front end is not proper software engineering” is bullshit but at the same time if you hire someone to write code and then ask them to write CSS I can understand being frustrated.
- On the front end, you can put lipstick on that pig.
  On the back end, it has to work and there's nowhere to apply lipstick.
  OTOH, it seems there is a trend in modern dev practices that it's acceptable for a service to terminate frequently, as long as it respawns, which finally made me figure out all the sci-fi tropes where a ship's systems aren't responding. It's because too many are crashing in concert. But mostly terrifying that this practice would ever be considered practical.
- I recently joined a team that had no backender for a year and the frontenders maintained the backend. In this case the image totally applies.