The Rise of the FrontBlend Developer

Over the past few years it seems to me that there has been somewhat of a developmental arms race, with some factions of the programming community planning on bombarding the simultaneously excited and learning fatigued brains of other developers with new tech.

Clearly JavaScript has managed to become the chosen one, and despite it being what I would deem as the drunkest of all the languages, I too am fond of it.

Now, on the periphery we also have Kotlin, the rising in popularity creation of JetBrains. This language, in my humble opinion, is pretty sweet — despite its abandonment of standard ternary syntax.

From the perspective of this article these two languages have one key thing in common. They’re both primarily for frontend development. But, Node.js’s ease of use and somewhat déjà vu like familiarity to those who know JavaScript but have not worked on server-side projects before make backend development a much more approachable task. Or, at least it did in my case when I started using it.

Still, as client side JavaScript platforms become omnipresent in the absolute I believe that the developers who wield them will increasingly begin to build backends to start serving themselves.

Indeed, I venture a guess that they will begin switching sides of the stack often enough to blend the front and back ends; creating some kind of frontBlend developer.

But, I fathom that this won’t be the result of just JavaScript per se, as Kotlin compiles to JavaScript too, which in turn has led to possibilities such as: https://medium.com/@Miqubel/your-first-node-js-app-with-kotlin-30e07baa0bf7.

It seems possible, if not certain, that as Android devs adopt Kotlin they will move further down the route of dabbling in backend development by means of Node.js based frameworks.

And, don’t worry, I know that Java is already extensively used for backend development, and so any movement from front to back end as a result of a shared language would have already happened if this were going to make a difference. Therefore, it’s arguable that there will be no further blending afoot.

This is a good point, and I don’t have the answers Sway. But, I will say this: there is hype around Kotlin, and I think that this could lead to people exploring the other side of the stack in the way Android developers could have been doing this whole time with the Play framework.

Also, Firebase<-. Every app and website using it to satisfy their api needs has required its developer to engage in a dance with frontblend development. I say this because Firebase paths are effectively APIs that have been declared on the client side.

Furthermore, as database considerations such data denormalisation become requisite components of understanding for client-side developers, their conceptual bounds increasingly tread onto what was mostly the keep of the backend.

Unearthing this understanding of databases as well as implementing the API queries in the app or website both reduces the importance of having a traditional backend, and increases the stack-width of the client-side to the extent wherein it appears to be shamelessly trespassing on what was the backend’s side of the lawn. But, it’s still client side code. Or, is it more of a blend?

I would say, however, that database consideration has always been there in mobile’s case, but now there’s more of that kind of thinking required, and more of it + more somewhat pseudo Firebase API declarations in your app = more blend.

To those of you wandering if there will be a backToFront development swing, that is to say, backend developers moving to the frontend, I believe there could be but not in the same numbers, if it happens at all.

The reason for this is simply that Kotlin, JavaScript and Firebase and its MBAAS brethren are all primarily used by frontend or mobile developers, and therefore the blend is going from the front to the back — not from the back to the front.

But, who knows, if a new developer’s first framework is Node.js, it’s highly likely that they’ll feel a lot more open to engaging in mobile development by means of using React-Native, than how PHP developers of the past would have felt about doing the same thing using Objective-C just a few years ago.

Anyways, time will tell the degree to which this blend occurs, but in my opinion, development is getting easier, even if user demands are getting higher, and therefore I believe the width of the stack that developers handle may increase.

That is, of course, if they don’t give up on software development as a result of the frustration of trying to keep up with constant barrage of shiny tools being thrown at them.

P.S. Please, don’t stop developing those shiny things.

P.S.S. But maybe just take a week off.

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