Guillermo Rauch

I think you make an excellent observation that FE is a system engineering challenge.

Algorithms do play an important role as you can see in this great presentation by Marc de Marco (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90NsjKvz9Ns)

However I think it's fair to say most FE engineers apply existing solutions and the system design is a bigger part of their role.

I differentiate between UI Engineering and Front-End Engineering. The former emphasises design integration (pixels) and performance (rendering). The latter is broader scope and emphasises the systems engineering.

Both have to deal with system design. UI is about components and messaging across the components with the front-end application being the "system". FE is about components that integrate the front-end application with what have traditionally been back-end APIs and services.

In many cases when people say FE they mean both FE and UI. I would not get hung up on these but they help to clarify what you are talking about and who you are trying to hire.

In the case of design and pixels there are specific challenges around dealing with layout and CSS and achieving 60fps. Creating UI components is an exciting area. For example see Pure UI (http://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui/) by @rauchg. Mess in Web Components (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/). Challenge of style encapsulation...

So there are a lot of unique challenges and skills and experience required in UI engineering.

There are also…

congrats team! 21m series A is hefty even before coronavirus. Good to have locked it in.

I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem.

Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview" mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]:

> The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way.

I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns.

The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's…

That post was from 2010. I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of building from scratch rich, modern single-page apps that satisfy today's users' needs. Have a look at "7 Principles of Rich Web Applications" [1] by the creator of Socket.io, and at my comparison between Meteor and the MEAN stack [2].

By the time you've built a reliable data synch transport that watches the server database and pushes changes to clients over intermittent connections, then pushes changes from client back to servers when they reconnect, all this with access control, a Meteor developer will have built 10 proof-of-concept apps, determined the product-market fit, and have a working web app for users to use.

[1]: http://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-applications/

[2]: http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_stack

> private, local and in the hand of the people.

We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity.

If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options.

Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience).

[1] https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency

I actually strongly advocate for: SSR and server is the absolute best default[1], and Next.js gives you tremendous flexibility on where to place your compute[2], including skipping SSR altogether[3], with the best-in-class static export that can actually at least put some content in your HTML instead of a blank page[4]

[1] https://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-applications#pre-rendered-pages-are-not-optional

[2] https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1637136013083684864

[3] https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1636693508223270912

[4] https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1636827365677383700

So for context that was written whilst I was funemployed before joining Airbnb.

- René etc is more conceptual - it’s obviously not a practical day-to-day tool

- React Sketch.app solves the problems in our org that I can do something about, but also lets you do combinatorial/permutational exploration (see the GIFs in the intro!) because _it’s just javascript_.

Both embrace the paradigm of UI-as-a-function-of-data, and really are indebted to the mark that Guillermo left on my brain with https://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui