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what is frontend and what is backend
Monday, May 22 2017
While Gretchen was out in the woods this morning with the dogs, I took advantage of her absence to cut some nice flat pieces of thick sheet metal from the scraps of oil tank I'd removed from the Brewster Street house. Such cutting makes a terrible racket, and I didn't want to draw attention to what I was doing. Gretchen wouldn't approve of me "hoarding" the sheet metal, though I see little reason not to. The flat pieces take up almost no space, and thick piece of sheet metal have lots of applications.
In amongst actual work (including two video conferences), I managed to scan ten months of my old handwritten journals, from Dec 15th 1984 to October 31st 1985. There is an account for every single day from April 5, 1983 until a series of missed days in July of 1989, and in the period I've been scanning, there is at least a page for every day. It's amazing I was able to keep up with such a writing schedule on top of my schoolwork and all the computer experimentation (both hardware and software) that I was doing. That wouldn't be a problem until college, when the priority I gave to my journal ate into my ability to study and complete assignments. All of that was was offline, and there was a five-year hiatus betweeen the petering out of my offline journal and the beginning of this ongoing online one. I've been out of the womb for just shy of 18000 days, and I have a discrete written account of considerably more than half of them.
On Mondays in my remote workplace there is a weekly meeting of the senior developers (Ni and I) with our boss Da, the head of IT. He's a nice guy, but he's shown himself to be more authoritarian and inflexible than had initially been obvious, and that's begun to grate with others in IT, particularly in the backend. Today I broached an idea that's been percolating in other quarters and seemed to gain new relevance when Da tried to have Ni help out on frontend tasks in the donor database tool, an in-organization tool not completely understood by anyone but me. Ni knows nothing about the donor database and asking her do to stuff there was just boneheaded. The idea I broached in the meeting today was that the "frontend" and "backend" distinctions in our IT department don't really apply to frontends or backends, they apply instead to public-facing websites (what we call "the frontend") and to organization-facing websites (the backend). While it's true that mastery of mySQL is more useful for the organization-facing websites, I also find myself doing a lot of frontend work, particularly in Javascript. I can make the frontend for the donor database do just about anything I want because I understand it in great detail. Meanwhile, I know nothing about the database structure of the public websites, and it makes much more sense for Ni to worry about that stuff. Truth be known, we're both full-stack developers, and it's easier for us to handle all parts of any particular website feature in our respective spheres. Ni agreed enthusiastically with what I was saying, partly because she's come to view her fussy frontend tasks as a chore and a poor use of her degree in Computer Science. Da, being inflexible and authoritarian, mostly disagreed, and then talked about how, "after the revamp," there really will be a separation between frontend and backend in all the various websites. But to me, the "revamp" is so far in the future that it's silly to assign tasks today based on how things will one day be.
Later, in chat with Allison, I noted that Da had stopped talking about "version 2" and is now using the word "revamp." I said that I though this was probably because even Da had begun to sense that "V2" had become a joke. For her part, Allison said that the word "revamp" had her picturing a six-foot-tall goth girl.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170522 feedback
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