Front-end development leaves me slightly in awe of the developers. How do you do it?

I come from a background in scientific computing. I can write boundary element code that's fast, performant and safe. I can build Monte Carlo simulations that work well. I'm even decent with backend development in Flask somehow. But ask me to build a simple web form and... argh!

If you're in awe over the development itself, wait until you meet UX experts.

Those people are fucking psychic wizards

On a more serious note though, as someone who's dabbled with front-end dev for a few years now, I actually wish we were all more like you!

Front end UIs should be fast, performant and safe, especially since it's what the user directly interacts with and prefers to use. But everyday there's some new framework that adds unneeded complexity and bloat when it doesn't need to.

Heck, with how far the Big Three (HTML, CSS, JS) have evolved over the years, some would argue no frameworks are needed period.

@obsecurity I believe it. I'm developing an analytics product for my company at the moment. Database, fine. Analysis and plotting, fine. Machine learning, fine. Even the backend of the web app is unproblematic. But I'm going to fall down on the interface.

I'm sure I'll build something acceptable as a prototype, but the first thing I'm going to do when the team expands is build a proper dev team with front-end and dev-ops people.