The frontend is one of the fastest growing areas of development, remember the development of interfaces 3 years ago and compare it with what is happening now and it will immediately become clear - a lot has changed, if not everything. At lightning speed, approaches that were considered advanced become obsolete, and new libraries become literally popular in a matter of days.
On the eve of the second meeting of Odnoklassniki on the frontend, which will be held on November 26 in our St. Petersburg office, we talked with speakers about their path to interface development, about what they consider to be the main industry events for 2019 and a decade, and tried to understand what problems the community is facing now , and also asked how interface development will develop in the future.
Under the cut answers to many questions that interest you.
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Let's start with a simple question, tell us about yourself, what are you doing?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
I’m doing frontend in Odnoklassniki
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
I am currently developing the Management Center at Hazelcast. Sometimes I stick my nose into everything else that we have associated with JavaScript.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
I am responsible for the web version of the VKontakte message section.
How did you come to the development of interfaces?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
About 15 years ago, I accidentally ended up in a company that made websites. Then he started freelancing and off we go. He made websites for many hotels and travel agencies in St. Petersburg. Then things began more seriously.
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
I have a classical university education in a specialized faculty (Faculty of Computer Science, Voronezh State University). So it was quite expected. However, for a long time I thought that I would be a musician.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
In eighth grade, dad presented a book about HTML. In the ninth grade, he closed the 3 exams with the development of sites (for example, there was a site about the history of the First World War). I brought the pages to the school on a three-inch floppy disk, because I didn’t have Internet, access to the Internet appeared a year later in another school - 5 MB per month were allocated to each student.
What do you think is the main problem facing the front-end development community now?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
Immaturity.
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
Make WASM so convenient as to bury 99% of desktop applications.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
It seems to me that the industry is learning to cope with the volume of accumulated knowledge. Therefore, people discuss a lot of issues related to this process.
How to make the industry more junior friendly? What should profile education look like? How to organize interviews?
Does the emergence of new specialties have the right to life, because the tasks of a WebGL specialist are fundamentally different from the tasks of an interface developer? Is there a webpack configuring engineer? What, after all, is to call a specialist in this field (programmer, front-end, developer, engineer)?
We have a huge number of questions for which we have to find answers.
The decade is coming to an end, what do you think the tenth years will be remembered for the front-end?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
The industry upheaval that nodejs made was the ability to write to js on the server.
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
I think the world of JavaScript is developing extremely fast. In almost ten years, too much has happened. Now a couple of years is seen as an ancient past. Several generations of libraries and frameworks around which applications were built succeeded. I can’t presume to speak for the whole decade, but the last couple of years have been marked by an awareness of the convenience of type checking at the compilation stage. A confident march of TypeScript across more and more repositories.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
JavaScript has become the most popular programming language over this decade. The sharp rise of NodeJS and npm. The heyday of UI frameworks. The emergence of a large number of complex libraries for bundling, transpiling, instrumentation - the code that we write has ceased to be the same code that works in production.
We started writing on JS on all platforms: on the server (NodeJS), on mobile devices (Apache Cordova, then React Native), on the desktop (NW, then Electron), on watches, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. We started writing in JS in editors written in JS.
And speaking of 2019, what would you highlight as the main event in the world of front-end development?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
I believe that an important event in 2019 was the transition of Edge to chromium and the emergence of GraalVM.
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
For me, this year was not a year of upheaval and discovery. Rather, it is a year of systematic development and strengthening of the positions of those decisions and ideas that are already, de facto, the standard.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
I for myself can not yet highlight anything specific.
The reaction is now extremely popular, do you think it is possible that something will replace him, and why?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
If WASM develops strongly enough, then it is entirely possible that we will see something new. But React, like BEM, supplies the methodology. And it is quite possible that the library will change, but the approaches will remain the same.
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
This is always possible. 5 years ago everyone did the front on AngularJS. I do not presume to predict the future.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
It seems to me that React is, first of all, a popular idea, and not a popular library. There are dozens of libraries that solve the same problem in a similar way. For example, I like Preact.
I am sure that many new ideas await us. Therefore, I try to keep track of which new libraries are appearing, and what ideas are embedded in them.
What do you think is waiting for front-end development in the near future, can developers be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence from Ilon Mask?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
Front-end development will become more mature. We will become less likely to discuss some understandable little things on the meetings. And we will talk more about architectures and decision-making in the development of large projects.
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
I would like to see more and more familiar desktop applications in the browser as a universal platform. And how will it turn out ... Let's talk in 5 years.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
I think the threshold for entering the industry will continue to rise. Simple tasks are gradually automated, but complex ones will last us for a long time.
And the last question, tell me why you should come to the meeting and listen to your report?
Oleg Korovin, Classmates
Classmates are strong in Java. We are one of the most highly loaded projects in the world in this language. OK Java is used almost everywhere - 99% ok.ru are written on it. At some point, we realized that working on a javist + front-end scheme is not only inefficient, but also expensive. However, we cannot abandon Java in the frontend.
OK users live throughout the CIS, but broadband fast Internet is not available everywhere. Server rendering helps us deal with the problem of low network speed. Taking into account the features of our frontend, we came to a bunch of React + Graal and we believe that the future of projects with Java legacy is in such a solution. In the report, using real examples, I will show how we implemented all this and tell you why you should not be afraid of the legacy code in the fund, even if there is a lot of it and it is not clear what to do about it.
Andrey Goncharov, Hazelcast
It’s worth coming to the meeting because there will be many cool, close-minded people. You can talk about sore. In the report, we will skim through the main popular ways to optimize applications on React, see how much they cost us, and talk about one not-so-traditional approach to optimization. This will be a good occasion to meet all these strangers around, discussing (and condemning) on the sidelines of coffee the need to render thousands of elements.
Tim Chaptykov, VK
Come to meetups to chat, get to know and share your opinion.
Guys, thank you very much for taking the time to answer the questions!
We are waiting for everyone who wants to chat with front-end development experts at a meeting on November 26 in their St. Petersburg office.
Come, it will be useful and interesting!
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