[debaserab2]

This barely touched on what you need to become a competent front end developer and the aesthetic competency you need to have to make something look nice. This is the thing I most often see as completely stopping backend engineers from becoming "full stack".

Full stack != learning react.

[whalesalad]

So true. Full stack is understanding the layers of a modern web stack like basic webserver/port binding knowledge, basic unix skills, http, DNS, rest, serving apis, consuming apis, using queues for background jobs, database schema, avoiding n+1 queries, authentication mechanisms for browsers and clients, email (dkim+spf), serving assets, handling browser caching issues, the list goes on... an SPA with react is really just touching the surface.

[jaredsohn]

That's not what the GP said; the GP was arguing from the other direction saying that to be considered full stack you need to understand design, too.

[jshmrsn]

I hadn't heard the term "n+1 queries" before, thanks for mentioning it. That's something I deal with often, but didn't know it had a specific name. https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/n_pl...

[lcw]

I don't think aesthetics play very much if any role in being a effective front end developer. Look at Craigslist the thing is terribly ugly and dated but still widely used and functional. The aesthetics look like someone with no taste in design or modern UX wrote it. If someone writes the next CraigsList by your definition are they not a successful front end developer? Sure having a taste for design is nice but hardly necessary to be successful at the craft.

[mrits]

Craigslist is actually a great design. Just imagine if a UX developer had their way with it. It would look like myspace.

[debaserab2]

Not a good UX developer(/designer).

Craigslist has a great minimalist interface. There's a lot of ways it could go wrong, and it avoids a great majority of them. That said, I don't think a lot of development has gone into actually considering their use cases and developing workflows that prefer them.

Obviously, it's still a very useful site regardless, but I would not call it a well designed site.

[JustSomeNobody]

Exactly. Craigslist work because it doesn't use huge images, scrolly this, flashy that. It works because it uses links as they were meant to be used. It works because it is terribly easy to navigate.

If a "proper designer" got hold of it, they'd ruin it.

[mawburn]

UX != Design

[mrits]

I find it really laughable that companies think you can separate these things. I realize that is the popular opinion but it what has gotten us into this situation in the first place. We have all these "pretty" sites that are unusable. It's an increasingly common skillset and you might as well get a pragmatic person to handle both.

[debaserab2]

No, they are not a successful front end developer.

It is possible to have a successful website without having good front development.

It's possible to create a lot of useful things that don't have good design.

[enraged_camel]

>>It's possible to create a lot of useful things that don't have good design.

Usefulness is good design.

[debaserab2]

No, it's not necessarily. You can have a product that produces a good result but isn't easy to use. That doesn't make it not useful.

[omeid2]

If we are going to split hair, I would argue that good design is mostly reasoned with theory, usefulness is more about pragmatism.

[FanaHOVA]

Craigslist wasn't built today. Name any recent product with the same design.

[mawburn]

There are lots of products that don't have great design. We're on one now. But there are tons and tons of B2B products shipping from full stack developers every day that don't have great design. But they work, and because they work, they make people happy.

Good aesthetics are nice when you have them, but are absolutely not a requirement for a good piece software so long that it does it's job and the UX doesn't suck. Most real world people don't care how it looks as much as a lot of designers think they do.

Not too imply design isn't important for a real product. But if you're hiring full stack developers, then you're probably not making a ton of comps.

[FanaHOVA]

Was HN built today? :) In both cases, you are talking about websites were there's minimal interaction with the website and all you do is read. While that's ok for certain kinds of products, it's not for all of them. So I think we agree that design doesn't make the software, but most devs are used to having weird interfaces and interactions that aren't always clear to normal users. (I'm saying this as a full stack dev myself while looking at the colleagues that I've worked with in the past/present)

[mawburn]

It sounds like you're talking about UX. There is quite a bit of intersect, but you can have fantastic UX and still be aesthetically gross. You can't have a weird interface that doesn't make sense and still claim to have a good user experience.

And on the other side, an app can be aesthetically beautiful and total have crap UX, which is too common with a lot of startuppy products.

[coolgeek]

Being built "today" doesn't have anything to do with it.

Although they have better UI/aesthetics, from a UX perspective, Google and Amazon famously hew pretty closely to their original product design.

What matters to these companies - and, more importantly, their customers - is delivering the content that the customer wants, at the fastest possible speed.

[SpaceL10n]

Still nicer than Craigslist, but its close: https://www.gov.uk/

[oretoz]

You have a valid point. Do you have pointers to learning Design for a programmer? I know about book 'Deisgn for hackers' and there are many resources on Photoshop/Sketch etc. but I haven't found nifty little projects like you have in programming where you design, say a toy compiler. Also Photoshop/Sketch are paid and/or platform specific. Any useful pointers would help.