The tastelessness of frontend for a backend developer

A lot of backend devs are not very thrilled with frontend development. Of course the curious nature of a programmer drives him to learn a lot, even technologies that he never uses, and frontend is not an exception. All good backend devs know a thing or two about frontend, and could contribute to frontend code with relatively ease with some extra delays of course because it’s not the most familiar kind of codebase for them. I too belong to this group. I was never too thrilled about frontend, because it felt like a narrow domain, specialized yet mainstream.

When frontend becomes more meaningful

That being said, frontend is super crucial in practice! A backend developer who works in a company with more than single-digit number of dev employees is able to ignore it, simply because his colleague will do the job. However, when you want to build something entirely yourself, be it freelance work or a personal project, then things change. When this happens, disinterest towards frontend limits you a lot. This is when you end up learning enough about it and accidentally become a fullstack dev.

The science behind building a web interface

As soon as a dev gets serious about delving into frontend, he is hit with the infamous question: “What framework should I choose?”. Regarding this I have very good news for you! As mentioned before, frontend dev is a specialized domain in the sense that it’s about solving a quite specific problem. That is: “How to make beautiful and fast apps that run on a web browser”. Surprisingly, the science and technology behind this seemingly straightforward problem has only recently come close to being solved. After all, there is no secret that over the years tens or hundreds of frameworks have emerged, each one introducing new theoretical and practical approaches. Unlike what someone might think, this hasn’t been happening purely because of the hype of building something visual on the internet, but also because the existing solutions feel lacking, and everyone has been feeling that things can be done better.

The end of chaos

As of 2025, this chaos has finally dissipated. After all this fruitful experimenting, humanity mostly solved the most challenging problems that frontend developement imposes. It’s clear that the major frameworks are starting to resemble each other. Originally, each one aimed to tackle a unique problem, but over time, all those challenges turned out to be relevant. As a result, each framework began borrowing ideas from the others, ultimately addressing all the issues along the way. Therefore, the value of going out of your way and use a framework that is not widely adopted or supported has diminished. I believe we are exiting the “hipster frontend framework era”. In subsequent posts I will go into the details of why this is true, and show how a update of a mainstream framework fills the gaps that x frameworks have been trying to (spoiler alert: React Router v7).