
Ask HN: What should a back end software eng learn to build simple UIs for apps? - inevitable2
I am an experienced software engineer, mostly focused on backend infrastructure in the data-engineering and data-science space. I have built distributed applications handling petabytes of data daily, robust APIs, extensive work with NLP algorithms, and including a fair amount of AI&#x2F;ML work and experience with devops.<p>However, by the very nature of my work, the interfaces to most of my applications is limited to the CLI. The farthest I&#x27;ve  gotten to front-end is Python plotly and bokeh dashboards. I&#x27;m looking to change that.<p>I would love to build tools like https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mobz&#x2F;elasticsearch-head or https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mwielgoszewski&#x2F;doorman. I&#x27;ve built custom tools to the likes of Airflow, sans the web UI. When it comes to hackathons, I&#x27;m the guy with the boring CLI app. The world of front end frameworks is overwhelming, and I&#x27;m really not sure what I should start learning. I don&#x27;t much care about fancy optimized UIs, just the know-how of how to build simple web UIs talking to a REST interface, for example. Another dimension to showcase my work, besides the CLI. I&#x27;d appreciate any pointers to resources or advice.<p>Thanks a lot in advance.
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karmakaze
I was in the same boat for quite a long while. My search thus far has yielded
Vue as the simplest single page app framework to consume an api using no
central state and optionally an eventbus.

For server side rendered pages like rails, prefer crystal+kemal or possibly
elixir+phoenix.

What styles of languages do you prefer?

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ignorantguy
I am a backend engineer and I really like working with React.

