Frontend Developers: the Newest New Kingmakers with Kate Holterhoff from RedMonk

And, the way that I, you know, became interested in tech was I, you know, not only was surrounded by a lot of engineers at at Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon as you can imagine, but, also, I had a a digital humanities project, which was called Visual Haggard. It was a Ruby on Rails archive, and, looked at illustrations of a 19th century author named H. Rider Haggard, who, sort of adventure invented the, Indiana Jones character. And, so it was, it was fun. It it it got to, into my interest in art and, and literature and, allowed me to to compare, these amazing illustrations that came out in both serial editions and also in book editions, but, also, you know, in the process taught me a lot about, web development.

And, it was hosted on Heroku, on the free tier. So, sadly, it is no longer, available. But, it was, you can still see it on the, the Internet archives, you know, way back machine. But it was, sort of my introduction to, you know, just what it means to to work on a team and to to, you know, learn about versioning and all those sort of things, which I transitioned into, actually, you know, working in the industry when I decided to to leave academia and, you know, quit pursuing my my former ambitions to be a professor. I still have a lot of blazers, though, so, you know, you can't you'll pull those out of my my cold dead hands, you know, my corduroy blazers.

And so there's there's this sort of, you know, there's a poll cast, over it. And and and that frustrated me because I knew that not only were the front end developers that I worked with extremely sharp, very, you know, talented, kept up with what was going on, but, also, a lot of the most interesting innovation that I was seeing as an analyst tended to be on the client side. And, you know, so there was sort of the domain of of folks who were interested in in, you know, what was actually, happening on the front end. And, so I think anyone who follows, you know, the the the hype cycle around front end frameworks, can see that. But then what I think spurred me to write this actually was I was listening to a podcast with Paul Cobblestone, who's the the CEO of, Supabase.

He's been on your podcast. Right?

You know, I kept having these conversations personally with, you know, back end developers or even, like, directors of engineering who who kinda made it seem like front end developers, didn't need to be heated in terms of purchasing decisions, and yet here is the coolest, hacker news, y combinator startup, you know, talking about how important the front end is. And then I started hearing it all over, and it was about that time that Vercel rebranded as the front end cloud. And I said, this is big. This is something's happening here. And so I just kinda went through some of the the the history that I was seeing, and I date the I date the sort of renaissance of the front end in terms of, being recognized as having purchasing power, again.

So this is this is a kingmaker in terms of, like, who's gonna make these purchasing decisions. And I it it seems like, in 2019, the, the article by Chris Coyier called The Great Divide, he really, gets into the the transition that's happening with the front end developer, as as a a a job where it's not just a matter of, you know, developers who who might be junior, who are are not able to to manage, back end, infrastructure, but that they these front end developers are actually drawn to design. They're drawn to accessibility. They're drawn to all of these really important, tasks that need to happen on the client side. And so and and in addition to being drawn to it just kind of for the the exciting reasons of, like, this is something that we actually see out in the world.

You know, web development is something that, you know, any website is gonna show us, but also has that sort of UX, factor, which I think a lot of front end developers find appealing. But, also, I'm hearing all you know, at at KubeCon, all the discussion was about WebAssembly. And so I'm saying, well, wait a second. You know, if if the compute on the front end is really where all this excitement is happening and everybody now is talking about, you know, how it is that that, where, the the actual yeah. The the computation is gonna be happening.

If that is is moving to, you know, the devices themselves, then this is a a a big shift and actually suggest again that the innovation and the excitement around the front end, it it can't be ignored. And so all of this, kind of came together with, in a 3 part series that I wrote about the the future front end where I take on the term I, you know, I sort of, outlined my my my thesis in the first one. The second one, I talk about the history of the full stack developer because I think that's worth digging into. Because, again, that that is such a big part of how, the front end is is conceptualized, not only in terms of, like, the the individuals who actually do the the work, the developers themselves. And, again, at RedMonk, you know, we're we're all our concerns tend to be with, what the developers are experiencing.

But, also, it it it got into the the sort of labor practices and, like, what is it what is included in the a full stack. Right? Because nobody is wanting to actually manage an entire stack. Right? This is it's too much.

And so I was able to to find a lot of, lights in the industry, who who discussed that, and, was able to pull out why it's it's sort of a disservice and and to to the developers to focus on the full stack over, you know, saying that the the front end is doing some interesting stuff on its own. And then, finally, I I wrote, the final piece on the the future of front end, which talks about how we're actually probably gonna move away from the term front end. Like, that's, you know, the future of front end is that, you know, it's, it's probably not gonna be around forever because the entire industry is shifting. And so, I will I'll I'll keep this monologue short here. But, you know, the that AI is is certainly showing us that, where the the work that developers are gonna be doing is going to shift radically, in the next 2 years.

And in 10 years, I don't think we'll even recognize what it is that they do.

So, you know, if they want, off, they can use a a service like Supabase because it's included as part of the package. And so that's what makes it appealing is that it it takes away the fiddly bits of, back end engineering and makes it so that these front end engineers can focus on the work that they actually enjoy doing. And so the future of front end is going to sort of further that where, again, we're moving away from managing all these complex, parts. And so moving to more managed services, moving to, you know, more serverless solutions, move moving away from having these front end engineers, waste their time. I mean, I talked to some who were working on YAML files.

Can you imagine? Because, you know, they had right. You know, they don't wanna be doing this, but they they kinda get pulled into it. Right? So we're gonna move away from that and let the automation and AI handle, some of these more complex, and, Yeah.

Just like, I I don't know. I I I have a hard time coming up with a better word than fiddly. But, yeah, just like the the parts of the back end, and ops space that that that have historically, you know, made engineers wanna pull their hair out. Right? So, moving away from that and allowing them to focus on the parts that they enjoy, which is, like, you know, thinking through the user experience.

And, you know, even gosh. When I was a front end engineer, I could just lose hours when I was building out a web page and in ways that I am not able to just lose myself in in other tasks. So there is this sort of magic to working on, coding that I think, is is is going to be, enabled by, you know, just being able to get up and running. Right? So I think that the, yeah, the future front end is is gonna be focused on that, of you know, but more and more.

That's what we're gonna see increasingly happen. And then, you know, AI code assistance. I mean, that's gonna be a big part of every developer's work practices from now on. I was at, DevNexus recently, and it was remarkable to me because every demo that I attended had some sort of AI code assistant. And they weren't, like, making a big deal about it.

It was just part of the demo. It's, like, part of the workflow. And I just thought that was, you know, tremendously interesting that, you know, they're just taken for granted now. And so it it's super, curious to me too when I talk to companies who are like, oh, yeah. Well, my company hasn't invested in an enterprise, Copilot plan yet, but we're all using it.

And I'm like, well, really? Maybe that's that's probably, you know, a little problematic. And so when we think about the kingmaker idea, which my colleague and the cofounder of RedMonk, Steve O'Grady, coined about a decade ago, and he was thinking mostly of the back end. You know, his his sort of go to example is Slack, at IBM, where they started using it, among the developers, but it wasn't, you know, immediately, made it it wasn't sort of, like, given to them from the the c suite. Right?

It wasn't like, hey. We're gonna all start using Slack. It was that, hey. All the developers are using Slack. I guess we need to invest in Slack.

Right? This is something that we're all, you know, just using as part of our our, you know, internal communication. You know, folks need to pay attention to what the developers are doing. So that, I think, is what we're going to see happening more and more, among front end engineers who are interested in sharing that burden, getting away from just being considered, like, a a jack of all trades in terms of, like, a full stack developer, but able to focus on the things that they actually are interested in doing. And I can give some more examples of of what that can look like.

I was at render ATL and saw a a few demos actually that that sort of dug into that concept as well.

Right? They'd come up with their wireframes, and they'd pass it to the design team, right, who would who would make it, into a PNG file that had the colors, swatches all mapped out, and then they would choose the images that needed to go in, etcetera. And then they would hand it to the front end engineers, and then the front end engineers would would, code out that PNG file. And so, you know, that's 3 different teams that were involved. And I think what we're seeing the future is gonna be smooshing them all together.

And so, you know, one sort of deciding individual is gonna be able to do all of them. And so one of the things that I, I know Vercel is working on is this little sort of fun AI hobby project called a VO, which is, you know, you use natural language to type out what it is that you actually want. You're like, okay. Well, I want, you know, a card that is gonna look like a Twitter card, and it'll have these different, sections on there. And, of course, I want the text centered, etcetera.

So, you know, and and natural language can do that for them. And so, you know, the UX engineer the UX designer could do this, the, the designer designer could do this, or the front end engineer could do this. You know? Frankly, the, the management team could do this. Right?

The project manager. And so it the capabilities of folks who don't have the, the, you know, the ability to, code themselves is is going to, you know, just broaden. Right? It's I don't know. It's it's a really strange and exciting time.

So I'm I don't know. I I I guess I don't have all all the answers. I I don't have a a a time machine. Can't go shooting into the shooting ahead, but I I'm seeing like, what I'm seeing is that it's it's happening now. It's happening fast, and, you know, companies are are taking advantage of it. Yeah. Figma's AI, abilities were able to, you know was it copy, Apple's weather app? Right? I mean, it's it's amazing, and they, you know, they look great.

And then what you what you're describing there around, like, product managers, designers. So is it is it kind of, like, just heading to one, like, startup, quote, unquote, like, startup person that just does the whole thing in it?

So we we've got JavaScript, being their their language of of choice. Right? Python. And so all of these solutions are going to further create these abstracted, ways of of, you know, managing apps. And they're and and front end engineers are more okay with it than back end engineers have been historically.

You know, that's not always the case or universally the case, but in the past I mean, gosh. I when I was building websites, we would use page fillers even. I mean, that's basically low code. We were dragging and dropping, sections and, you know, that was it felt right. You know?

Because the we understood that the the marketing folks who were gonna be using these websites needed to have the ability to, manage them without having to mess around with the code, especially after, you know, WordPress got got through with it. Right? So there's just there's ways that, the front end is following them can not only kind of, be a good weather vein in terms of what's happening in the industry, but is also a very good, market to target because they pay they're willing to pay for the for abstracting away, the pain of of managing these, services. So, yeah, Vercel. Right?

I mean, it's just a wrapper around AWS, but nobody wants to manage, their AWS. Right? Well, front end not nobody. Front end engineers don't wanna do it. And Vercel makes it so easy to to spin up an app quickly, because they're you know, they handle all of that for them.

And, of course, the the issue of, like, black box solutions being bad and nobody wants to to not have visibility into what sort of errors they're getting right. I mean, black boxes, you know, front end developers understand that these are are problematic, and they are hyperaware of lock in, the dangers with that, and the, scaling. Right? That they that these, sort of solutions don't always scale. So they're you know, they get it.

But if it is a startup, a lean startup like you mentioned, where you've got, like, a team of 1, that's okay. They get their they get their app going, quickly and, you know, wait, get their VC funding, all of that, then they can expand the team, then they can, you know, re, you know, recreate their app, and, you know, post it directly on some of the cloud providers.

Why why front end developers might want to create apps, that leverage Cloudflare's primitives, which in that case was durable objects, which allowed them to, yeah, create these sort of project apps that allow for, multiple users to, you know, edit something at the same time, so the way that a Figma file is or, or like a Google Doc or something. So yeah. And and, gosh, when I talked to, Jay Chris Anderson, he, his, Fireproof, I know that they're very interested in, what is, what they're seeing in the front end space and targeting those users because they just use a script tag, to, for that for their, database project. So those are the sort of, vendors that I've talked to, but, gosh, there's so many. So, yeah, I, gosh, I yeah.

If I could get my my Rolodex up here and and give you a longer list. But, anyways, but, yeah, those are those are a few good examples.

I think that anytime there's a time limit, nobody wants to invest in actually building, like, a little yeah. Like, a website for their wedding or something. Like, something they want the permanence of, like a Vercel, which allows you to create a a little, static, web app that isn't going anywhere. And, so I I would say speaking to them directly as well. So, if you're only talking about full stack developers, they're not always hearing themselves, addressed there.

And also thinking about, the JavaScript ecosystem. So they're they're gonna be aware of their own sort of toolkit. So even if your product is built with Rust, talk about the integrations with, yeah, TypeScript, JavaScript, some of these frameworks. Make sure that you've got some SDKs that integrate with the tools that they're already using so that they have an on ramp to discovering what it is that, you know, that their tools can accomplish. And I'd say that there's some sort of ineffable things as well, and I love joking around about, how Vercel, of course, has their, like, cool black T shirt vibe.

And so yeah. So I'd say front end engineers, for good or ill, tend to be a little more design focused, and so they do notice if you've got a, you know, a a landing page that doesn't look like it's been updated in 10 years. Right? So make sure that you get, like, a slick, design on your web page that demonstrates that not only are you keeping up on the docs, that you're actually gonna maintain whatever project it is that you want them to to adopt, but also that, but also that you have a a sensibility that aligns with them. They're just you know, they are attracted to, a a a good user experience as well as an attractive one.

Again, I of all the the RedMonk analysts, I'm the most, like, okay with no code and low code. Like, I I'm it doesn't scare me. I'm okay with it. I get I get the problems with it, that you're locked in, that there's, you know, it's a black box, that you don't know what you're doing. But I I see that the benefits of, like, using a Zapier or something like that where you can just drag things around and, you know, create these flows and the time savings are worth it to me, because, actually, they they these apps can become ephemeral.

I think, you know, one of the benefits in my mind of AI is for not necessarily just developer productivity, but for developer happiness. And I just I remember talking to some engineers who would work on these internal projects for 6 months, and then the product manager would change, and their app would get thrown away. They would never see the light of day. And and this these are this is more of a pain that I think ops and back end developers have than, front end engineers. Because a front end engineer, typically, especially at the digital marketing agency I worked at, our our websites would would be launched, you know, within a few months.

Right? I would see the results of the work that I did, as with the entire interactive team. That was less the case for folks who are working at a large, say, an insurance company or something that, you know, are toiling away on these, maybe a a digital transformation project or something, some sort of internal app that that, you know, only in that only folks on the inside are gonna see anyways. But if it gets thrown away at the end, it's like, I mean, what a morale, you know, listener. I mean, it's it's terrible.

So I I I hate those stories, and I love the thought that, AI and automation are going to enable that sort of pain to be lessened because you can create these more ephemeral apps and then break them down more quickly. And and, you know, even product managers who might have an idea of what they want, instead of having to waste a lot of resources on building out different prototypes, they can build their own prototype. They don't have to waste anybody else's time. They can try it out themselves, and maybe they like it. Maybe they think it works.

Maybe they don't. And, I mean, there's what that adage that you, if you're starting a company, you throw away the first, the first project, right, the the the first draft and rebuild it. That's gonna become only, more easy as as these tools, become available. But but, yeah, I'd say in terms of if folks are trying to market a low code or no code tool, sure, developers might be on board. I mean, it sort of depends on the use case.

But I would say targeting the, product team, the designers, the UX team, that would be where you're probably gonna have more benefit. That's, that's more of the the audience that would be receptive to to those tools.

Like, these kind of things are, like, sort of they're they're definitely needed right now, and everyone knows how the real world is, like, complex. This is not realistically gonna go away. But in a sense, like, it could if you don't inherently need someone. There's not like a job to be done of, like, manage a database. It's like it's required because of the complexity of the project.

But if these things become, like, much more, like, out of the box, you know, where, like, a product manager can just start typing in, like, what they want and then it exists, then it's like, yeah, it's it's it's definitely interesting. It feels like that's the future proof way to go, maybe. I don't know.

And, so he, you know, again, is very much interested in what front end engineers are are up to. But, you know, he he talked to me a little about, like, the build step and how, front end engineers sometimes are a little too driven by the hype cycle, that they're a little too, interested in in, you know, just what's cool and maybe making things overly complicated. And so I think that those sort of cycles are going to continue, and but, you know, being aware that there's, there's a lot of, what, business cases that are are happening behind the scenes, But that yeah. Front end engineers are you know, we're all gonna become a version of that at some point. And I I don't know what the new term would be, but if we all become front end engineers, then nobody is 1.

And so we're gonna need some sort of maybe it's just a developer. Like, maybe we all just are gonna be, you know, developers at some point, you know, dragging and dropping on our our little, studios and, you know, with our Figma files and, you know, deploying to Vercel and and, you know, everything is just easy. Right? We don't actually have to look at a a line of code.