
Is the Front-End Developer dead yet?
An optimistic war zone letter to future self or a love letter to UI development.
Dear future self,
I have just one question: Are we extinct yet? If not, please read through.
Hi, it’s me, 2019 Raf. I hope you’re doing fine and haven’t forgotten to take your vitamins.
As you know, it’s an exciting time to be a front-end developer. Interface development had never been so mainstream, there’s never been so many great tools for client-side rendering, building cross-device apps were never close to being this easy. We’re even starting to get serious about multi-platform frameworks. Remember IE6? Yeah, that’s ancient history now. We’re living the dream.
We are having a couple new issues though that I hope you guys have figured out by the time you’re reading this.
UX in the rough
It’s a strange time to be a UI/UX developer. You see, we recently had this whole transition from an uncomponentized life to an “omg there are so many options, how do I render this thing”.
Let’s call these BUL (before-ui-logic) and ALI (after-logic-invasion).
I’ll not even get started on the whole BUL era, things back then were stressful enough for us trying to render screens on multiple immature and nonsensical web browsers, let alone having to do it with little to no tooling nor a shadow of well-spread interface organizational concepts.
All hail to the mid-10s Atomic Design wave. The thrill that took over when we collectively started to realize that we need to be DRY from the UI design all the way to the UI implementation was indescribable. That was an insanely great achievement for us as human beings and Brad Frost and his team are to be forever praised for it.
Now let’s talk about ALI
Logically implemented interfaces are amazing, right? They save us time on building/maintaining them and of course, they scale beautifully. Getting this right is or at least should be, the go-to priority of every software company at scale right now.
We’re facing this strange problem though, where most developers seem to have little to no joy while building interfaces. At the same time, building interfaces are a significant part of their daily professional lives.
This is having a direct impact on the UX quality of the end products that we are shipping. I’ve recently heard from a fellow front-end engineer, and I quote: “I would rather spend hours fixing weirdly broken unit tests than having to deal with CSS”.
Let me just remind you that we’re in 2019. Browsers are behaving pretty consistently, flex-box is here, grids are also on the green. And yeah, we have variables.
But do you get the weirdness? Quoting the current Wikipedia article for web development: “Front-end developers are responsible for behavior and visuals that run in the user’s client device.” Reading this, one could get the impression that the enjoyment of testing that interface would be way down on the priority list from the one for crafting it.
I’ve recently opened a survey on a couple front-end focused meet-ups and conferences where roughly 4% of all front-end developers had some desire of having an interface focused software development career.
A recurrent issue raised during the surveys was: “Don’t you think that with the evolution of UI design tools the UI designers will be able to figure all that out by themselves?” — All that being UI development.
We’re currently living in a state where the tooling is here, well-spread solid concepts are also here but we definitely need to figure out a way to fix this conundrum at scale. Our products and end-users are suffering from it today.
Depending on your geolocation, it’s tough for any company to build a strong UI focused development team and we usually end up relying on the everlasting war between designers and developers to build something that resembles a solid product.
Companies are more often than not failing on implementing reliable Design Systems, not because the technology or the right concepts aren’t here — they both are. They’re usually failing because most of us crafting the UI aren’t that keen on getting into and understanding basic design concepts.
About a developer’s perspective and colorful circles

Having lived it at its fullest, this is my personal perspective on the evolution of web/application development and design over the past decade. With the emergence of great design tools and concepts plus the creation of new front-end rendering frameworks, there’s an ever-growing common ground between UI design (G) and UI development (B). We’re just living at a time where, for the most part, both sides of this equation seem to be in denial of that.
I sincerely hope that by the time you’re reading this life had figured itself out and our products, in general, are being shipped with an average better user experience than they do today. Without any wars being waged in the process.
All the best.
Rafael, 2019.
https://caferati.me
Footnote, please read.
This letter is a satire of the current common scenario of web/application development v design. I do not believe UI developers or front-end developers will get extinct anytime soon. Neither do I believe that we won’t be able to ease this problem given the proper time.
The conundrum is a known issue caused by the advance of logic into the front-end stack plus the general lack of desire from most logical beings to get into apparently illogical areas. Which neither UI design nor development are.
