
Skew, The Frontend Engineer's Misery - twampss
http://lethain.com/entry/2009/apr/28/skew-the-frontend-engineer-s-misery/
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jsrfded
AP-style news can be dull, but I wish more bloggers would use a bit of the
inverted pyramid [ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid> ] when
writing. I wouldn't have clicked if I didn't want to see what the author had
to say. But if I can't tell what the point of the post is about after three
paragraphs, I leave.

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lethain
The inverted pyramid is effective at conveying information quickly, but
generally essays are not breaking news, but instead rehashing or adding a new
perspective to something old. In the later scenario, I don't think the
inverted pyramid is as effective.

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diN0bot
I have to admit that I was a bit confused, too. i skimmed the diagrams and
pictures--good work!--but the text was just not readable enough. </2cents>

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edw519
I dunno, exactly when did web apps get so frickin complicated that we needed 4
mutually exclusive parties with opposing goals to build them. The skew line
graph is hilarious.

I'm not saying that this doesn't happen. I just don't understand why, in the
majority of cases, the front-end engineer and back-end engineer (and even the
project manager) can't be the same person. We're not building Amazon, are we?

From someone who has written plenty of complex software single-handedly (like
many here, I suspect), this looks like a huge case of over-complication for no
good reason.

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tdavis
I take on the role of all 4 parties along with various other ones; I have my
entire career. I still think there's something to be said for having specific
skill sets. A great designer will usually design a better site than me; a
great frontend developer will always churn out more elegant Javascript more
quickly. As they say, a jack of all trades; a master of none. It probably
doesn't take 4 people to build most web apps, but could 4 people have done it
_better_? I think that's the real question.

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moonpolysoft
Pretty much nailed it. My official job has been frontend engineer for almost 2
years now and he describes all of the most frustrating things about this job.
The perception that the deficiencies of the backend can be easily papered over
in the frontend is something I fight about on a regular basis.

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IsaacSchlueter
Absolutely.

My focus is on front-end engineering (Javascript, markup, and CSS), but I've
written plenty of PHP, MySQL, and C++. I can say with absolute confidence that
back-end engineering is orders of magnitude simpler and easier than front-end.

A lot of front-end engineers come to this discipline without CS degrees. Maybe
they used to be designers or writers who happened to get into building web
pages, and found some skill with it. There's a popular conception among front-
ends that server-side coding is somehow more difficult or mysterious. _That's
"real" programming_ , they think.

That idea is 100% weapons-grade balonium. Client-side coding is much more
challenging. If you're a front-end engineer operating under the assumption
that back-end coding is hard, start spending some time reading the code for
the components that you're interacting with. Pick up a book on OOP patterns.
Behind the fancy lingo, you'll see it's actually very simple by comparison.

