Frontending
I started writing code in the late 80's, when I was in elementary school. Since I was a little kid I showed a lot of interest in computers. I remember being about 4 and getting stuck on a window where some kids attended a weekly programming workshop, fascinated by the magic spreading out from the TV screens. After several times of repeating this scene, the teacher started to let me in to play Frogger for the last 10 minutes of their class, as I wasn't old enough to follow their program.
A couple of years after, I learned LOGO at school on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Later on, my father got me a Commodore 64 on the condition I'd study instead of just playing. So I started taking private lessons. BASIC all the way. It was amazing.
In the early 90's, we had our first PC. XT, 8088 processor, ambar monochrome display, DOS 3.30. I kept doing private lessons: now it was Pascal, Cobol, Fortran.
In some point, everything started to evolve faster and as usual, alongside with this evolution came the difficulty to keep up with the latest hardware. My XT and my noisy dot-matrix printer started to feel slow and outdated, and then frustration came in. As a teenager, I got seduced and dragged to other interests and activities, so I quit anything tech related for years, except, of course, from arcade gaming.
The 2000's found me traveling abroad and I was desperately in need of work. I managed to assembly a Pentium II PC with parts I found in the garbage and eventually started to develop web applications with Flash. I became an expert in ActionScript and it was my source of income for more than 10 years. I was fascinated by the work of people like Yugo Nakamura or Joshua Davis, and by the possibility of creating interactive experiences with high visual impact.
One day, it was decided to ban Flash. Several years before, and until it happened, a myriad of new devices appeared. I was very used to building an app and deploying anywhere without worrying of keeping things consistent. From one day to the next one, my job turned from being creative to fixing bugs.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript. A new framework every week. A new standard every month. Device, orientation, gestures, click, tap, operating system and browser, as stacked layers of complexity. Fertile soil for all kinds of bugs. Everything seemed futile and provisional, everything I knew felt useless. Professional development teams evolved to be larger: the job of one person was now the job of four.
I had to learn new skills in order to keep working. Eventually, dealing with frustration got harder than I expected, and I decided to take a break.
After some years I started coding again and it took me a while to catch up with industry standards. I became proficient with React and modern build practices. Now things seem a little bit more stable... but for how long?
You can learn all kinds of techical skills at school, or even teach yourself. But handling frustration, stress, and anxiety is something you learn with experience, especially working in teams. Communicating with others is key. Some people seem build for it, but we are all different.
In this sense, being prepared is probably the most important thing we can do. Where is frontend going? What new technologies will emerge in the coming years with AI and quantum computing? Let's find out!
A couple of years after, I learned LOGO at school on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Later on, my father got me a Commodore 64 on the condition I'd study instead of just playing. So I started taking private lessons. BASIC all the way. It was amazing.
In the early 90's, we had our first PC. XT, 8088 processor, ambar monochrome display, DOS 3.30. I kept doing private lessons: now it was Pascal, Cobol, Fortran.
In some point, everything started to evolve faster and as usual, alongside with this evolution came the difficulty to keep up with the latest hardware. My XT and my noisy dot-matrix printer started to feel slow and outdated, and then frustration came in. As a teenager, I got seduced and dragged to other interests and activities, so I quit anything tech related for years, except, of course, from arcade gaming.
The 2000's found me traveling abroad and I was desperately in need of work. I managed to assembly a Pentium II PC with parts I found in the garbage and eventually started to develop web applications with Flash. I became an expert in ActionScript and it was my source of income for more than 10 years. I was fascinated by the work of people like Yugo Nakamura or Joshua Davis, and by the possibility of creating interactive experiences with high visual impact.
One day, it was decided to ban Flash. Several years before, and until it happened, a myriad of new devices appeared. I was very used to building an app and deploying anywhere without worrying of keeping things consistent. From one day to the next one, my job turned from being creative to fixing bugs.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript. A new framework every week. A new standard every month. Device, orientation, gestures, click, tap, operating system and browser, as stacked layers of complexity. Fertile soil for all kinds of bugs. Everything seemed futile and provisional, everything I knew felt useless. Professional development teams evolved to be larger: the job of one person was now the job of four.
I had to learn new skills in order to keep working. Eventually, dealing with frustration got harder than I expected, and I decided to take a break.
After some years I started coding again and it took me a while to catch up with industry standards. I became proficient with React and modern build practices. Now things seem a little bit more stable... but for how long?
You can learn all kinds of techical skills at school, or even teach yourself. But handling frustration, stress, and anxiety is something you learn with experience, especially working in teams. Communicating with others is key. Some people seem build for it, but we are all different.
In this sense, being prepared is probably the most important thing we can do. Where is frontend going? What new technologies will emerge in the coming years with AI and quantum computing? Let's find out!
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