What you do when the Twitter influencers decide to make fun of Microfrontends
Imagine that you are the person who 34 months ago started work on the most well-known microfrontends framework.
Here’s a microfrontends definition for the React community
- Multiple React roots within your page, each optionally containing its own routing.
- A simple top level router, which controls which React roots are active for any route. Usually done with a “route prefix” such as “/app1”.
- Each react root is rendered by code that has (1) its own repo, (2), an independent build from any other microfrontend, and (3) a separate deployment from any other part of your frontend.
- Assign different development teams ownership to the distinct React roots. They can experiment with different technologies without company-wide consensus (independent build) and can release their code without waiting on any other part of the organization (independent deploy).
Here has been the last 48 hours on Twitter regarding microfrontends:
It has gone so far that influencers can now just use the word microfrontend as the butt of any joke
So what do you do as the author of microfrontends?
You can try a few tweets (that probably won’t work), hoping for a closer examination of the idea instead of complete dismissiveness:
You can double down with bold predictions :)
And you can just get excited that your idea is finally getting some attention (even if it’s negative), four years later.
Microfrontends are microservices for frontend code, and have very similar pros and cons to backend microservices. The microservices vs monolith debate is a fun one to learn about — use cases, organizational structures, and team goals help guide which one is best for a particular situation.
From 2015–2017, the few groups who stumbled across it loved it, but at large no one cared. The wider javascript community hadn’t heard of it and had other problems to focus on, like state management.
Last year, 2018, was the year that people started hearing about it in the broader community. It came as a result of someone inventing the term “microfrontends” and blogging about it.
2019 is the year where the idea is powerful enough to be hated. As one of the originators of the idea, it’s exciting to see where this goes.
Does the idea stand on its own enough to overcome and flourish under the close scrutiny it will be put under?
