CSS is a programming language because that’s what you’re doing when you write it; you’re programming the application’s presentation logic.
It's as if he wants to get into a philosophical debate about what programming languages are.
Frontend is hard and it's made unnecessarily hard by HTML,CSS, and Javascript. I swore off of frontend due to the evergrowing, unnecessary complications.
What I'm looking forward to is web apps written in a single programming language with no javascript knowledge necessary at all. There are rust frameworks that generate the JS boilerplat to load WASM. Some use the DOM to make their UIs, some insert a canvas and use WebGL, some generate HTML in the backend and replace parts of the live frontend with that, but my favorite is when there's no HTML, CSS or JS in sight.
As for the devaluation of frontend, I always found it weird that frontend devs were paid less than backend devs. I respect frontend devs for being able to do what I can't. We're in this together. Pay us all a good wage. We're workers and have to stick together.
I'm self teaching myself to become a true Fullstack Dev, mainly using JS/TS, but also semantic HTML and Vanilla CSS, but have more than a passing knowledge of Bash, and have scripted web scrapers in Python. I also want to become proficient in C, Golang and Rust over the long haul. Lastly, I am studying, and plan to upkeep my skills in Data Structures and Algorithms, as well as Optimizing SQL queries.
That said, I have a degree in Illustration and can definitely identify with many of the sentiments this article expresses and agree with pretty much all the points he makes. You can make the most well designed back end API or optimized Database in the world, but what it returns won't mean shit to the user if its frontend isn't accessible, easily understandable as to how to interact with, readable, and also beautiful.
People toss that last one out as a want, not a need, but how often have you chosen a client app over another because you just preferred the way that one looked?
Ultimately aesthetic artistic beauty is one of those things we not only live for, but survive because of. Without it we become depressed, bored, and aggravated. It's as important as food, as water, as air. We may not die as quickly when deprived of beauty, but we do die all the same without it.
I’m a developer, and WooCommerce, in my opinion, is pretty great. Just like Wordpress, if you look at it more like a development framework, is pretty flexible on what it can do. If you’re not a developer and don’t want to touch code, just buy the plugins you need and go from there. Pretty nice compromise tool between flexibility and ease, although if you have a really tiny budget, the plugins can add up.
How does it compare to the developer experience of Shopify? I hated Shopify. Unforgivable that there wasn't even a way to have a dev environment, but this was a few years ago.
I'm also a developer. My job has me work with WordPress almost exclusively. I run hundreds of WordPress sites and the hosting servers that run them.
WordPress is not good, nor is woocommerce. They are, however, convenient to the layperson. That's basically all they have going for them.
WP and Woo are major resource hogs. The data structure is atrocious. There is no ORM and everything is shoved into two tables: posts and postmeta. All your pages, blog posts, products, orders, form submissions, everything is a 'post'.
99% of all plugins are horribly written garbage that are major security vulnerabilities and updates to patch those security holes frequently break everything.
WP sites require frequent maintenance to keep them updated to avoid those security issues and since you never know when an update is going to break the whole site you have to do so carefully and make sure you have lots of backups.
Automattic, the company that makes WooCommerce, is scummy as fuck. Just recently they released an update that added a new cookie which triggered firewalls, and made this new feature on by default. They also are selling all WP.com and Tumblr data to be used for AI. Not to mention the fact they intentionally confuse people into thinking WordPress.com is the same thing as WordPress.org, and since the CEO also controls WP.org they can get away with breaking all the rules of the 501c3 nonprofit's own rules in doing so.
I'd written a plugin for WooCommerce as part of working on a B2B service. It was several years ago now, but from what I remember it seemed quite easy to write plugins for because it just used WordPress's hooks system.
WordPress isn't the fastest codebase around, so you'll probably need to spend more on hosting to get it running well enough, but compared to other PHP e-commerce offerings like Magento it'll fly.
I also came here to say Woocommerce, I helped a small retail store set up their shop. I will say if someone doesn't have ongoing support I could see hiccups appearing eventually if you have any kind of customization. There's just a lot of plugins and things you can tweak. But that ability to customize means you can do something just the way you want it, vs bending a system like Shopify to try to fit edge cases.
This is cool, but it bothers me that the inhale cycle doesn't end with completely filling the circle with blue. I feel unfulfilled, like when the DVD player screensaver doesn't hit neatly into the corner of the screen when it totally looks like it's going to
I think it's because you're not supposed to expand your lungs so much that they feel like they're going to burst.
But if you scroll to the bottom of the css and look at line 69, you can change transform: scale(90%); to transform: scale(100%); to see if you like it better.
If that's your hope for static generating, "contact form with backend" goes against those goals. It's an important requirement shifting the entire viability and weighing of platforms and hosters.
To make this work well with the Fediverse, you'd need to be able to specify your own server (e.g. programming.dev), which is under discussion at https://github.com/fedidcg/FedCM/issues/240.
To make it work in a way that preserves privacy as a value held by many current users of federated social services, yes.
But it seems like it can be implemented as is in any federated service and improve security for 3rd party frontend apps.
Maybe I'm missing something essential, but holding out for a perfect implementation which may not be broadly adapted might be a mistake on a developer's part if they want to provide value to ther service they're developing for.
My career has followed some of that journey, and I also have come back to using Alpine, HTMX, and a server side rendering for SPA-like apps. Some pages are just almost all HTML, and just use HTMX to switch the client content without a page load.
I've been waiting so long for :has(), and had no idea it was finally implemented. This is huge for userstyles. Now I should be able to hide retweets and inline ads from Twitter with just a couple lines of css.
I feel for this guy. It's not just frontend though, I've seen it with backend, DBAs, etc. It really is just a reflection of what the business considers valuable.
It's true it happens for other areas too.
But I think it might be true that frontend is often viewed as "the easy" part by other devs. Especially older backend devs seem to think it's all super easy. At least in my experience.
And that businesses try to push for all devs be full stack doesn't help.
I'm a "full stack" backend dev - I mainly do backend work, but make minor changes to the frontend, like adding a button to a page that already has 3 other buttons.
I've got a couple of friends who didn't want to do even the occasional front end work and moved to devops. They'd rather deal with k8s and monthly on-call rotations than deal with frontend.
I don't know who gave you the impression that all backend devs think of front end as "easy", but it's definitely not the case, at least in my friend group of n=4. We treat frontend as insane arcane magic and we don't want anything to do with frontend because we find literally everything else easier.
It's definitely not all. My current team definitely has respect for all that special tooling / ux stuff I'm doing. Especially since nobody was able to do it before I was hired.
But I also had the experience that older Backend devs don't take it seriously.
My guess would that those stoped learning about frontend tech in the late 90s and it's a case of not knowing what you don't know.
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