Frontend fatigue? Share your story
Are you fatigued as a Frontender? You are not alone. Frontend developers are moving in rapid waters all of the time. The explosion of frameworks and tools during the last 3 years was supposed to help us, but a feeling of overwhelmingness can hit easily.
The polyglot frontend-er
Our mother tongue is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and add SVG to the mix. But to help us in our tasks, we've added Sass/Less, multiple templating languages, Markdown, JavaScript transpilers, testing languages, and what not.
Mobile
That small constrained half-baked fragmented browser we have in our mobile devices is, ironically, the one defining the best practices nowadays. Serve the king first, even offline.
The JS framework ecosystem
Although jQuery is still the most popular JS library, we have also frameworks that help us managing the bigger complexity of web applications. The problem is that each major JS framework creates an island with its own ecosystem of tools, templating and testing languages, and their own native mobile integration too. In theory, everything is agnostic, but clearly, each framework has its favorites, and you need to learn and play along.
Our platform is evergreen
Our platform is the browser, and we can celebrate that all major browsers have become "evergreen" during these past years. New APIs and changes are becoming a reality faster than ever. Take for example Service Workers API, picture element, WebGL, CSS4, SVG2, ES6 etc. Do they sound futuristic? Well, they are a reality, partially introduced already in the browsers without the user even noticing. Moving forward to adapt, adjust and "catch up" is now a constant.
The "Automation" holy grail
Automation help us greatly, but tweaking automated workflows all day long doesn't feel too productive. Sometimes, you just want to return to the basics, and craft your work with care, without technical debt and fragile modern workflows. How do you feel about this?
So much fatigue. Why we do it?
Because we want to delight the user, the content author. We thrive when we implement the best experience and design that the browser can deliver. For that reason, we will blend Drupal to the limits, use the latest tools available and everything at our fingertips to create compelling web experiences. With that, the fatigue vanishes.
Tell your story
Whatever your opinion is, we want you to come to Dublin and share your learnings with us. Tell your story by submitting a session to the Frontend Track. Explain how you mix and match Drupal, frontend frameworks and tools to become productive, enjoying the process and leaving the fatigue behind and delivering the best UX
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David Corbacho Román
Frontend Track Chair
DrupalCon Dublin