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I started my career as a full-stack developer, but went all-in on frontend because I felt I was …

… I started my career as a full-stack developer, but went all-in on frontend because I felt I was spreading myself too thin. At one point I found that I could choose to be almost good enough at doing two different things or extremely good at one thing. I chose the latter option. Modern browser apps are complex beasts, at least if you want to do them right. You obviously have to worry about all the technical bits --- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, your view library of choice, platform APIs like <canvas> and WebAudio, cross browser testing, bundle sizes, performance optimizations, techniques like optimistic rendering, all that good stuff. On top of that, you also need to work closely with designers to make sure they know the features and limitations of the platform(s) they're designing for. More often than not, you end up being a sort of bridge between the backend devs, designers, and product managers. A lot of times you end up doing design too, whether you like it or not. …

Original discussionAfter 6 years, I'm over GraphQL698 source comments · at import
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KL

> idea that a frontend developer would send a ticket to somebody so they can get all the data they need... it's just crazy. For me, what's crazy is that there are "web" developers who can't just add the endpoint they need while working on a frontend feature, or "web" developers who can't just add an element or a page for testing the backend endpoint. What ever happened to full-stack developers? The "frontend" and "backend" developer split is so incredibly inefficient that it's really jarring—you take something that should take 2 hours and magically, through tickets, delegation, and waiting for results (then repeat that for debugging, who knows how many times!), make it into a 2-3 day task. I once reproduced (black-box style!) a two-week effort by a three-man team in six hours of work simply because I had PyCharm and IDEA opened side-by-side and could write code on both sides at the same …

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AP

> ... I don't think a single person could build a product like Linear end-to-end without cutting corners. Cutting corners is a feature. I bet the Linear team is as pained as any, internally, at the tradeoffs they're making. There is no way to know "what to get right" without going through it. So for 80% of the dev cycle the job is to cut corners to get to the 80/20, rinse and repeat forever. This isn't against excellence and the dream of a beautiful product experience as your reply seems to convey.

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IN

IMO the fact that being a full-stack dev is so taxing is an indication that the stack as a whole is just way too complex and overengineered. Which is rather obvious from looking at the state of affairs on the frontend side of things. Desktop GUI devs don't usually have those problems.

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EV

I don't think the claim is that a single developer should be able to build an entire enterprise product, but rather that a single developer should be able to implement the software side of a task end-to-end. The latter is a reasonable expectation when your software is monolithic.

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