I agree with this article more than I expected. I suppose a more accurate title would be "Dividing front end development from back end development is an antipattern". At first I thought it was about the actual act of separating the codebases.
I find it really baffling how much animosity there is towards front end. Nobody goes out hating on back end. If I had to guess why there's so much hate, I'd posit lack of control. Front end development requires relinquishing a lot of control. You can't really choose your programming language. You can't choose your styling language. Often times you're being told how something should look by a designer, which can be a bit of a blow to the ego. Being ordered around by a gasp artistic person. The horror.
Even if you get to decide how things look, that's even worse in some ways. I know I've spent hours slaving over designs that just don't look good. Maybe you give up and resort to Bootstrap/Material Design, but that certainly feels like defeat.
I'll admit. Front end takes some acclimation. I hated debugging JavaScript for the longest time. But with modern tooling it's quite nice. Plus there's something really amazing and challenging about having real, non technical people interact with your code. Only developers will notice an API bug, but everybody will notice a client side bug.
I find it really baffling how much animosity there is towards front end. Nobody goes out hating on back end. If I had to guess why there's so much hate, I'd posit lack of control. Front end development requires relinquishing a lot of control. You can't really choose your programming language. You can't choose your styling language. Often times you're being told how something should look by a designer, which can be a bit of a blow to the ego. Being ordered around by a gasp artistic person. The horror.
Even if you get to decide how things look, that's even worse in some ways. I know I've spent hours slaving over designs that just don't look good. Maybe you give up and resort to Bootstrap/Material Design, but that certainly feels like defeat.
I'll admit. Front end takes some acclimation. I hated debugging JavaScript for the longest time. But with modern tooling it's quite nice. Plus there's something really amazing and challenging about having real, non technical people interact with your code. Only developers will notice an API bug, but everybody will notice a client side bug.