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?
Interesting, my impression is very much that the days of writing “pure CSS” is at an end, and that UI libraries and CSS frameworks like Tailwind is the way forward. But that is just my impression.
Tailwind is an example of those frameworks fighting against/crossing the native web technologies referenced further up with the links to webdev posts.
The idea of shifting CSS declaration into the DOM element class attribute seems flawed to me. You lose what CSS provides natively.
My impression is that writing “pure CSS” has been replaced by writing !important selectors that undo all of your component library’s auto-generated CSS, and then write your own CSS selectors on top, after trying to figure out the theming system for half a day… /rant
if you want fast web pages there’s nothing faster than pure CSS and HTML. those are both running native machine code in the Web browser directly.
JavaScript (with or without frameworks) gets slower the more things you do with it as it only works in a single event loop. this means one function you wrote that takes a long time blocks everything else from finishing until it completes, even the browser rendering and interactions. that’s why really bloated pages feel like they’re lagging and you can’t click buttons or scroll.
imo do as much in CSS and HTML and use native web components for reusable components that you can drop anywhere in your HTML. if you want it to feel like an application, since you have backend experience you could use web assembly but treat this as a single application, it’s not really meant to replace html/JavaScript
Those articles I linked have a good discussion of it, but pure css has come a very very long way and a lot of these frameworks aren’t even necessary anymore. You just bloat the browser, and for little good reason. Tailwind is nice to use if you don’t know much CSS, but still know some, since you can just look at a giant list of “what does this do” and choose one that looks good. But yeah, I think I’m going to cut back on my usage of Tailwind massively, it’s just annoying a lot of the time.