I have written about a variety of topics around frontend and React so far. From now on, I am going to write mostly about how I have survived as a frontend developer.
What do you mean?
Being a frontend developer is hard for a number of reasons.
- The techniques keep changing
- The platforms keep changing
- The tools keep changing
- The designs keep changing
- Hype
- Complexity
- Bad advice
- Outdated advice
- The number of platforms and resolutions to support
- The number of dependencies and tools to manage (a.k.a Dependency hell)
- The number of decisions to make about techniques, tools and dependencies
- The number of technologies to master
- Interacting with users
- Interacting with other disciplines (designers, managers, testers)
- Interacting with other developers
- Browser specific bugs
I am not saying that frontend development is the hardest. Many of these issues are not specific to frontend. All I am saying is that frontend development can be hard.
So what are you going to do about it?
Over the years, a few practices have helped my team and I handle the issues above.
- Keeping notes
- Writing maintainable code
- Slowly refactoring legacy code
- Staying away from the bleeding edge
- Cutting down dependencies
- Improving communication
- Mastering tools
- Conducting experiments
- Keeping it simple
- Cautiously adopting new technology and techniques
- Embracing automation (e.g. linters, formatters, automated tests, continuous deployment)
- Understanding instead of brute-forcing
- Extreme ownership
- Saying no
This is not a complete list. These practices are also not silver bullets. But they have helped us.
In upcoming posts, I want to go over each of these practices in more detail. If it sounds interesting, you can sign up using the form below to get these posts directly to your inbox!
