Diego Pacheco Tech blog

The current trend in front-end development is to be full stack. Being full-stack, has advantages from an efficiency point of view. However, having people proficient in both the front and backend can be challenging. The trend is that many javascript frameworks, initially only client-side, are moving to the backend and becoming full-stack frameworks. Backend change is happening gradually, probably starting with server-side rendering ( SSR ). Now, it is possible to have react code in the backend, which is referred to as react server components ( RSC ). Such an approach is not new. PHP , Rails , and Django have been doing that for decades now. Within similar timing, we saw the rise of HTMX where the backend levering HATEOAS returns HTML rather than just returning JSON. Interesting times. React is not the only framework (because it's not a lib) doing such a thing; we also have  Next.JS (on top of React), Svelte , Nuxt  and here is a good article on server components if you wan...

Services are a thing for a long time in the backend. +20 years I would say. Microservices are much newer however they also started the backend. Micro Frontends is a very hot topic in frontend engineering right now. Frontend engineering evolved a lot in the last 5 years. Ui are becoming more and more complex and frontend teams are growing a lot. With complexity and growth, we stumble into classical backend problems such as Teams Organization and Scalability and the need for Isolation as a base for Independence and increase the number of deploys. Frontend technology evolves much faster than backend. With all that comes debit and believe me or not the difficult to find people to work on old tech like AngularJS. 

The software industry is always becoming more specialized. We have backend engineers, frontend engineers, edge engineers, cloud/DevOps engineers and I'm sure we will have more specialization in the future. With specialization and growth on systems, we end up having more layers or places that we can put software. Microservices often end up making a huge proliferation of services at the backend(check out Uber case for that).  There are so many places that you can "put" your software but one particular place that is growing a lot is the BFF(Backend for Frontend)  place. Often we have different stacks for backend and frontend. Frontend often is on JavaScript or TypeScript. Backend is often in Java, .NET or Go. So the first dilemma is, is BFF a frontend thing or a backend thing? IMHO it's a frontend thing where frontend means consumer. So how different BFF is from a driver or client? Well if you look into drivers and clients they often dont have network logic like routing,...