The quiet, pervasive devaluation of front end

Re:The quiet, pervasive devaluation of front end by afavour on Friday March 08, 2024 @10:02AM (#39641635)

This spoke to me. Time and time again I see that when our industry is faced with a choice between user experience and developer experience, developer experience wins. So we ship insanely massive virtual DOM trees for sites that are 90% static, bundle hundreds of dependencies into giant JS files without thinking once about the user on a slow, outdated Android phone.

There is an "art" to the frontend, though I wish I could think of a better term than that. If I optimize a database query to shave off 100ms the benefits are immediately obvious and tangible. If I improve the frontend so that a feature is more discoverable it can't be measured by code so it's intangible.

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Re:The quiet, pervasive devaluation of front end by animal_spirits on Friday March 08, 2024 @11:28AM (#39642674)

If you are looking for a different term you can use the greek work "techne"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne

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Re:The quiet, pervasive devaluation of front end by Voultapher on Friday March 08, 2024 @10:17AM (#39641785)

There is real effect where we as humans optimize for things that are easier to measure and model. For example GDP vs quality of life.

And while I would think there is some connection between this effect and the observed effect of wasteful frontend practices, I think the more direct answer of innate human laziness and self-interest seem like a bigger factor to me.

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