I am a Frontend focused developer and I am wondering how many developers here are the same.
Love the Frontend and the problems to solve there. There are a lot of interesting problems especially with the introduction of Liveview and factoring that into the equation.
I’m not a fronted focused person but on my current project I’m doing a lot of it and it’s the first time I’m having pleasure in doing so. This is heavily thanks to LV and Surface.
I even took pleasure in doing some light-weight JS coding through hooks.
I have heard good things about Surface. I will have to take a look!
What part of Frontend do you have the toughest time with?
Unfortunately most Elixir devs are full-stack with backend focus developers. I don’t see too many Elixir devs with high front end knowledge 
I do React full-time though 
Surface makes LiveViews really nice to work with, even though they were nice to work with before 
I have a passion for creating good UI/UX from previous SCADA work so I do full stack. I find backend is much quicker and enjoyable than web frontend though. It’s so finicky!
I love working on frontend. LiveView+Surface+Tailwind is a very, very nice experience. I’ve tried AlpineJS and it’s cool, but I prefer to just use LiveView hooks since I don’t mind writing JS when I need to. I’m currently using React at work and dream of being able to ditch it forever in favour of LiveView.
I love Tailwind + Liveview + AlpineJS combo!
Do you use React for an Elixir backend?
Lol it is so true. I feel like it is because data can be a lot more mathematical and constrained. It is easier to reason about.
I love working on the front end as well. Sometimes I feel like there is more variety on the backend and more silly caveats to frontend work like “why is this broken on X browser/device…”. I came from a design background though so maybe I have just spent more time analyzing frontend problems.
Liveview was one of the things that originally got me interested in elixir and definitely made frontend work much more interesting to me, I personally feel like it’s a gamechanger in terms of what can be done for the user experience. Also being able to integrate react via hooks allows for some awesome stuff.
If you like frontend/UI/UX problems there is a book I highly recommend called The Design of Everyday Things, it doesn’t really focus on “tech” but I think I have applied more knowledge from that book than any other when building software.
@wking-io Surface is worthwhile, don’t hesitate to look at it. Having feedback on your HTML (e.g. Tags without its corresponding closures) is a huge blessing IMHO, and that’s just one of many beautiful things on the library.
One of the things I dread the most on FE was mentioned here, the whole “this will work here but won’t work there” deal.
But I guess this is a mess that we allowed ourselves to get into and I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to get out of.
I’m with you here, I used to praise Alpine because it helped getting JS stuff done pretty easily. But with hooks I feel is just better to go with vanilla JS.
Edit: I messed the quotes while writing on the phone and I don’t know how to fix, sorry 
No, my current job is a $ rails new --api backend with graphql and react—it’s a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine since no one is actually consuming our graphql api other than us. I really hate working in this stack but, to be fair, it’s because I’m working on and app that doesn’t actually need it (but that’s the way it seems to go in our industry… someone knows React so they start every project with it, no matter how simple it is). I still find the nuances of LiveView simpler to understand than those of React and it’s just simpler overall. I dream of finding work that is all just in Phoenix.
Also, I do think Alpine is great! Just the one hobby project I worked on where I brought it in I found it provided so little value over just doing it as a hook, but I’d definitely look at it again for other projects.
Also ya, I love Tailwind. I think it’s the greatest thing.
Huh, I haven’t looked into hooks enough. I need to try it. There are few times where I need any complex local data model. I just like the ease of working with elements without the boilerplate of having to querySelector a dozen elements etc lol
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