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It’s always Patrick, so both are the same
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
I sometimes wish my employer didn’t know that I can write Python code, so that I would never be assigned front-end work. I prefer to deal with programs that take lists of numbers and return lists of other numbers.
(I’m not as bad as one guy I used to work with, because at least I accept ASCII input. His backend code only took binary-encoded configuration files for no reason I can think of except maybe to punish anyone except himself who tried to use it.)
I’m terrified by this binary config file. Why?! Was he writing C and said “fuck it, memcpy”?
Edit: I suppose it would be more like “fuck it, fprintf(f, (char*)my_config_object, sizeof(my_config_object))”
I mean, python has pickle and people use that to store config. It’s a weird practice, and totally unsafe, but it works well enough. This wouldn’t be that different.
Who is using python for frontend?
There’s pytermgui for cli.
Flask and django I assume
If flask is frontwnd then im a full stack developer and definatly not some little code monky server raw html forms written by chatgpt with normatting.
Isn’t that backed code? Unless your using templating…
You could do templating with jinja, or do some data visualization with bokeh. I think there’s also something called dash. I don’t know much about any of them though.
definitely not what people are talking about when they say front end though
Using streamlit works suprisingly well for frontend
In my experience, that bottom image is equally applicable when Front End devs go Full Stack lol
Frontend dev here, can confirm. Last week I had to look at some Java code and was instantly greeted by some AbstractFactoryBuilderImpl. Nightmare fuel if you ask me.
Yeah, it’s accurate both ways
This is me.
I would say I’m a fairly proficient dev overall, though on this one project I had to work the frontend. It was shit. Everything was shit.
The backend was a steaming pile of crap, and all of the implications of terrible design decisions were offloaded to the frontend. The frontend became the source of every single delay as it was where all crap started to surface. They were ignoring it, so besides frontend communication was also crap. Eventually, in line with ignoring all other issues, they sacked me.
Long story short, backend devs: treat your FE devs well.
Both should be the bottom picture to be honest.
Most disciplines get more specialized as they evolve. Full Stack goes against that trend, and this meme points at the problem with that. I don’t think it’s going to last.
Overspecialisation can also suck eggs. Interdisciplinary research is trendy in science for the that reason. Even I occasionally read a paper and can see they’re missing some basic fact from another field or subfield that totally undercuts their result.
If you hear ‘full stack’, run.
What I was told by a fellow student, while I was writing my thesis (paraphrased).
It may suggest the company doesn’t want to hire the appropriate amount of engineers, with the appropriate expertise, and instead want a mule. It also may suggest that product quality is a low priority.
Came here to ask if I’m the only one grossed out by the term “full stack” and its exploitative implications. Thanks for explaining why :3
Hey, maybe they make up the difference in “exposure” or something! That’s a well-loved way to ask for free/underpaid work!
I love shitting on Fullstack devs as much as the next guy. However, sometimes it really just does make sense for an (often internal) product maintained by a one-person team, and it doesn’t have to mean that the organization doesn’t value them. I’ve seen it happen.
However I would not recommend it as a career path because it’s essentially impossible to tell what you’re getting into when you get hired. Could be what I just described, could be that you inherit the full responsibility for a 20 year-old perl+php5+xhtml+angularJS mess.
I think it can only truly make sense if you work independently and get to build projects to your own quality standards, assuming you manage to find a “scope is small enough that specialization doesn’t make sense” niche. This is very hard which is why in practice “full stack” tends to mean “master of none but good enough to get a product out the door cheaply”.
Backend Requirements: “When x,y goes in, I want x+y to come out!” - Okay
Frontend Requirements: “Well it needs to be more user-friendly, and have this rockstar wow effect” - Yea wtf are you even talking about? You want me to add random glitter explosions, because I found a script for that, that’s pretty ‘wow effect’ right?
6 E Q U J 5 wow!
Yeah if you have shitty UX people frontend will just built what they’re told. Or actually more often, you could have really talented UX people and management decisions are like “needs more buy now buttons, the 3 visible on the screen aren’t enough.” Shit flows downhill
Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.
æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn’t quite know how to export excel sheets though so you’d better build a robust validator. No, we don’t know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he’s on vacation for the next 8 months.
The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won’t be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don’t want the webpage to freeze.
And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.
Clearly fake. No task ever includes anything but the happy path. Loading or failure states are a myth
output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.
I’m sure there’s an npm module for that.
twitches
This is fine.
I am fine with this.
Yea, fair enough. My point was mostly: backend requirements are usually at least objective. “Json xml comes in”, “CSV goes out by email”, “The request must be processed under 100 ms”, “API should not return 400 on feetpics” - these are still mostly objective requirements.
Frontend requirements can be very subjective “The user should have a great user experience with the frontend”
Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think, but the backend requirements are just as vague: “Just make this button work”. In my example all the requirements would actually be figured out bit by bit over months, nevermind the prescience required to foresee future architecture-breaking features or scaling requirements. At least you can make a mockup and get instant feedback, flawed as it is.
On either side it takes experienced engineers to suss out actual requirements from customers/PMs. The main difference is that the backend (especially on the infra/devops side) is only accountable to itself if everything goes well, but ironically that means no-one knows or cares about the amount of engineering that goes into keeping PMs blissfully ignorant of the risks and complexity.
Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think
Hahah, well as a primarily backend developer, that’s what I think as well.
“Just make this button work”
If that button doesn’t work, that sounds like a frontend problem to me… ;)
But yea, as you mentioned, it probably comes down to experience. As the meme from this post depicts. When I dabble in frontend and make a WinForm for my devtool, people just look at me and are like “Uhhh, can you make it better?”
No sir, clearly I can not. And I have no idea what you mean with “better”.
Actually the front end stuff is more like “we need to make the ‘sign in’ button bigger. No one can click it because it’s tiny, and it’s in German.”
I spent years as a mobile developer and the thing that always drove me the most nuts was being handed a software design with lots of tiny buttons that were nearly impossible to tap with a finger. I generally implemented the UI by increasing the size of the tappable regions (without increasing the apparent size of the buttons) making it actually usable, but one time the designer discovered that I was doing this and went apeshit and convinced the project manager to order me to undo all this and make the tappable regions the same size as the buttons. The grounds for this was that implementing the larger tappable regions would take too much extra time - despite the fact that this had already been done and it took additional time to undo it.
So wait you actually had to undo it all? What kind of designer would make mobile buttons small?
I usually just do what they requested and when they come to complain I just tell them “well, you’re the one who requested this” and pull up receipts. My DM to myself on Slack is filled with screenshots and links to confirmations for bullshit requests that the product team made.
My DM to myself on Slack is filled with screenshots and links to confirmations for bullshit requests that the product team made.
How good does it feel when you pull out those screenshots to say, ‘no u’?
What kind of designer would make mobile buttons small?
Have you ever used a mobile app? Every commercial mobile app I’ve ever used has tons of tiny fucking buttons.
Someone who has tiny fingers
Fucking apeshit craze-balls, makes sense, business as usual.
Isn’t our main audience German? If you wanted non German stuff you shoulda asked for regional translations. Not only is that a change request, but you’re gonna be pushing the release window by months.
But it doesn’t even say “Sign in” in German. It says “Das Bootton” because someone thought it would be funny and never changed it.
That someone was RIGHT!
Marketing want us to add more typos to make the site feel more “friendly”.
As a SaaS founder I’m now wondering if this actually works. Will have to talk to the front-end devs on Monday.
Plese donot
Please don’t
Yeah that’s not a real back end
Man, if only backend demands were algebraically tractable. Often they’re related to frontend demands that may or may not make backend sense, since the frontend is all users see.
this is what starter kits are for lol
As a full stack developer (more experienced in back end) working on a full stack task at work I can confirm, yes, this is very true lmao.
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I’d suggest finding some examples or templates that are reasonably close to what you want, and working from there. It’s much easier to adapt something existing with small tweaks than building it all yourself.
If you have any concrete questions, feel free to shoot me a DM :)
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Yeah, gladly! I know how opaque and difficult that whole thing can be :)
It’d help if the JavaScript ecosystem could pause on inventing new frameworks every five minutes and instead focus on fixing their tooling problems.
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Same. Honestly no issues with react+vite that I haven’t been able to solve.
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This meme is backwards
le front end not actual work amirite
This is the dumbest trope. It’s not the same kind of job, or even very coding-ish, but all the frontends I’ve made are horrifyingly ugly, and I hated making them.
In my experience it’s normally frontend programmers that go full stack.
Exactly, this meme is backwards
It works in either direction.
That would make sense. They’re both very different from the other.
@LinearArray that 2nd image is me.
