On: Backend for Front-end

[nfrankel]

Author here. Yes, it's all about Conway's Law. Unfortunately, it's still a law that governs all companies. Fun fact: I stopped working in projects because I mostly had to find technical solutions to organizational issues.

PS: I wouldn't call it "political" (negatively connotated) but "organizational" (statement of fact)

[grose → nfrankel]

'Organizational' is indeed a better way to describe it. Poor choice of words on my part.

[nfrankel → grose]

I know where it comes from, don't worry :-)

[bradwood → nfrankel]

Right. But you could avoid this whole BFF malarkey by having a team that owned and released the BE and FE themselves.

[respondo2134 → bradwood]

This is the purest end goal though, if you've got a large monolith or you directly consume a shared backend with a large number of teams, how do you get there? BFF is just one attempt to decouple with another layer of abstraction. Eventually you can strangle the problem on the backend.

[bradwood → respondo2134]

CDC on that backend would be one way. You could stream the data out to the various teams who could then materialise a view of it within their application and then craft an API over that view.

[jcparkyn → bradwood]

How do you do that when you have multiple teams working on separate FEs, which all need to talk to the same BE?

[bradwood → jcparkyn]

You exploit Conway's Law by not having separate FE teams. I think this is called the Reverse Conway Manoeuvre if memory serves