> But 22 years of making user facing interfaces and I really don't feel more confident about it than I did on day one.

You might enjoy "Refactoring UI", which I find to be a good design reference (with lots of specific tactics and examples) for front-end developers. It takes a lot of mystery out of the design process.

[1] https://refactoringui.com/

I think you're probably selling yourself short. I also am a horrible designer, but I've built enough UIs to be able to at least add to the conversation.

I actually consider it part of a front-end developer's job to push back against designs that don't work. There are anti-patterns for users and many of them make life harder for developers (modals launching modals, for example). Some examples from my own life is a designer adding so many columns to a table that it would be too crunched on laptop screens, magic interactions that break a11y, or flows that just don't make sense for seasoned web users. Now that's not to say I can design a great UI on my own, but plenty of good editors can't write a hit novel either.

Most of the time designers are happy for the feedback, because it's cheaper to fix things early on and ultimately makes them look better.

You don't have to be a designer to spot the good and the bad, and I'd be willing to guess you've osmosed more than you give yourself credit for.

There are a _lot_ of frontend devs who don't, especially now that frontend is so much more than "slap some html and css together". I probably just know the wrong people but I can count on one hand the amount of frontend people I know that I would say have an eye for design. It's pretty easy to get by without it. :)

I'd recommend reading "Refactoring UI" (by the authors of Tailwind)

This book: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman really helped me with UX/UI thinking

This book is really good... (It used to be printed as "The Psychology of Everyday Things", if you're looking in your library).

It's more common than you'd think. The fact that you still care after all this time and also admit that you can't is actually commendable and very rare. There's nothing worse than an idiot dev who thinks he "has developed a sense". Congratulations on avoiding that fate for 22 years in row ;)