Focusing on Frontend Web Development

In the past few years, I've tried multiple technologies, each focusing on two simple reasons:

1. User experience as the main focus
2. Interesting for me as a developer.

In an article by Guillermo Rauch called Next for Vercel, he talks about a great reflection: **Applying (Amazon's Bezo's obsessive customer focus) to web development: "focusing on the frontend is the most customer-obsessive way to build your products" **. I think this is the perfect summary of user-focused web development.

Every interaction the user makes is with the frontend, the design, the way things render and works, the speed, the information, and what we want our brand to be perceived as is through the frontend.

If we want to focus on user experience, we need to focus on minimising the time it takes for content to be available to the user and for interaction. The rest is secondary. The user should have access to the main functionality and content of the website as soon as possible. This is a very important way of improving the user's satisfaction.

I think what Google is focusing on with PageSpeed Insights is a great example of where to focus. Metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP), First Input Delay (FID), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are great examples of focusing on the user experience. Take a look at Core Web Vitals for more information.

By saying this, I'm not minimising the importance of the backend. Backend development is essential for speed, state and data management, and stability.

For my products and for the services I want to provide to my customers, my main interest is in the frontend. I want to be able to give the users the best experience I can, so I will be focusing on improving my frontend skills.

Being a Full Stack Software Engineer means that you should be able to have skills in the frontend and in the backend but more important, on the way they interact with each other. My way of approaching this is to use "boring" and "proven" backend technologies and databases that offer my projects proven stability and performance at a low cost and focusing on optimising what the user sees and interacts with: frontend.