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Comment by shaolinspirit | Hacker News Reader

I've tried native mobile dev, web frontend and backend dev. The nuance of frontend dev is that you need to pack a lot of things into one process, so it requires more sophisticated coding skills. reactive patterns or stream based approach is a good-to-go knowledge to have. backend is easier to code, however the nuance is to split and scale it once you getting more traffic, proper configurations, dependency management, deployment etc. based on my subjective perspective obviously, there are far more things to consider. in general, do what you love ^_^

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The is only true at a small scale. The frontend is often like the tip of the iceberg - it hides an enormous amount of complexity.

I've worked on a lot of systems in my career and I have found there to be a lot more complex and interesting problems in the "backend" than in "frontend".

With backend development, there are very real consequences for making mistakes, and you have a high chance of being punished for making them. When I have front-enders moving down the stack I have to invest significant effort into this. Particularly around secure development, proper automated testing etc, they are fairly uncommon in the frontend but absolutely vital in the backend.

I do get more enjoyment - more feeling of having "made" something when I've worked on the frontend. There's just something about being able to interact tangibly with your work which gives me a big sense of accomplishment. That, and if you're working on a game/native code then the optimisation work is more immediately rewarding.

Oh: and I must say that modern frameworks have made frontend development much easier than it used to be. With Angular, Vue, React you can actually apply the good engineering practises to structure your code in a way that makes it more manageable than it was in the past (with JQuery + server-side templates).

The testing frameworks are also pretty good, helped a lot by the frameworks being built properly (inversion of control :drools:).

definitely, frameworks are great for a lot of use cases. I was as well touching a little bit mobile dev, which is still in some sense hard. You need in each app write a little "browser engine" with websockets, rest api with http cache, image caching and a lot of other things that the classical browser environment gives web developers for free.

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