Ask HN: How can a BE/infra developer handle the FE side of personal projects?
What about partnering with a frontend person on a % of future profits basis? Maybe going to some dev&#x2F;JS meetups and pitch your ideas there?<p>Depending on what exactly you&#x27;re trying to launch, it may only take a few hours&#x2F;days of work. If it&#x27;s interesting in its own right, does some community good, or even just has a good risk&#x2F;reward ratio (i.e. the frontend person puts in a few hours of work upfront for the potential of X% later on), you might get a few bites.<p>--------------------------------------------------------<p>As a former full-stack dev now focused on the frontend, I&#x27;m in a similar (but reversed) situation... I don&#x27;t enjoy working on backend stuff, but frontend side projects are very quick to whip up for me (can get a page up and running in a couple minutes, a workable prototype in an hour or two, typically).<p>That&#x27;s largely thanks to recent startups like Vercel, Netlify, Gatsby, Remix, Astro, etc. that have taken it upon themselves to improve the frontend (at least JS&#x2F;React) developer experience. The vendor support adds a LOT of quality-of-life such that it&#x27;s no longer as difficult as it was 3-5 years ago to spin up new MVPs.<p>As an example, my stack is often:<p>- Vercel for hosting, because they take a Git repo and host it for you in a couple clicks and manage everything. Free or cheap ($20&#x2F;mo) at MVP stage.<p>- Next.js (Vercel&#x27;s open-source React framework) will handle frontend tooling, routing, type checking, and linting for you with a single command (`npx create-next-app`). Starting the server is one more command (`next dev`) and your page is up and running.<p>- For the UI layer, I&#x27;d recommend either starting with one of their prebuilt templates (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;templates&#x2F;next.js" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vercel.com&#x2F;templates&#x2F;next.js</a>) and modifying it as needed<p>OR using a modern component system like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mui.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mui.com&#x2F;</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ant.design&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ant.design&#x2F;</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chakra-ui.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chakra-ui.com&#x2F;</a> instead of trying to learn and write your own component and JS+CSS code. Using one of these systems will allow you to compose complex apps out of well-made, well-documented, easy-to-use primitives, making it much easier to focus on business needs rather than basic frontend components and infra.<p>The basic MUI system, for example, is totally free. You can find third-party apps built on top of it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mui.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;#populars" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mui.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;#populars</a>) and pay a one-time license fee to essentially &quot;fork&quot; them, getting a prebuilt working app that you just attach your backend API calls to.<p>There are also low-code extensions of these frameworks (meaning you start with a GUI, plan out your app that way, but still have access to the source for future advanced changes). One example is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mui.com&#x2F;toolpad&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mui.com&#x2F;toolpad&#x2F;</a><p>----------------------<p>Is this a lot? Yes and no. React has a learning curve of its own, but it can take the place of having to learn raw HTML and CSS. (Yes, you eventually should know those things for debugging and polishing, but they are largely a level of abstraction below what you really need for a basic MVP).<p>Once you learn React, its primary value isn&#x27;t that it&#x27;s a great language (opinions differ) but that it has a humongous ecosystem of third-party vendors, free open-source libraries (basically any component you might think to build is probably already available on npm), and a wide availability of devs from hobbyists to full-timers.<p>Others in this topic will suggest going away from Javascript as much as possible (and using things like HTMX or backend-to-HTML solutions like the old days). That&#x27;s fine, but you lose out on the rich ecosystem of React and Javascript, so you end up having to build more yourself -- which is what you&#x27;re trying to avoid in your case.<p>My own 2¢: As someone who grew up with HTML and made websites since the birth of Javascript and CSS, the web has always been messy. It&#x27;s always been a semi-open ecosystem controlled by a few major companies (whether that&#x27;s Netscape or Microsoft or Sun or Adobe, or these days Google and Apple), so it very much suffers from design-by-bullying. Whoever is the power player of the decade gets to add their favorite technologies that everyone else is forced to adopt. Thus the web became a hodgepodge of document markup systems poorly fitted for modern apps, with various hacks on top of hacks built to satisfy some big company or another&#x27;s in-house needs. Sadly, that means going &quot;vanilla HTML+JS&quot; doesn&#x27;t leave you with much, just the shattered legacy of poor historical decisions.<p>React at least helps by encouraging componentization and abstraction of UI elements to functions, using cleaner data models (actual variables and objects) vs direct DOM manipulation (using page content as a store of state).<p>We&#x27;ve gone through many generational shifts in approach, from the raw HTML days of Geocities to the you-build-it, we-host-it approach of Godaddy and its ilk, to the &quot;all in one&quot; CMSes like Wordpress or Drupal. These days, (if you want there to be), there can be a pretty clear separation between backend and frontend systems, and with that specialization came a bunch of startups (mentioned above) whose approach is &quot;let us help you build it as best as we can, so you can focus on business logic instead of basic UI and infra&quot;. After 20 years of doing this, the current state of the web developer experience is actually my favorite so far. HTML and CSS <i>suck</i> for building apps (as opposed to documents), and although Javascript is a lot better since ECMAscript v6 (ES6), it is still inextricably tied to the DOM (and thus HTML elements) unless you use an abstraction like React.<p>It&#x27;s the difference between writing something like:<p>```<p>import {Datatable} from &#x27;third-party-ui-kit&#x27;<p>&lt;Datatable rows={myObj} columns={myColDefinitions}&#x2F;&gt;<p>```
(Where it&#x27;ll look good enough out of the box, plus give you filtering and sorting etc. for free, all with good documentation and support)<p>vs writing your own table generator, HTML and CSS for every cell&#x2F;row&#x2F;column. Could you do that? Sure. All the modern hosts will still support that sort of document. It&#x27;s just a pain to write and maintain.