RIPPLE: SRAJAYA BHAKTA PRADHANANGA
When I started learning frontend development, it felt like stepping into a whole new world. I had been working as a backend developer for a few months, and I was comfortable writing logic, building APIs, and working with databases. As for frontend, it was a different world for me. It looked simple on the surface but once I started my frontend journey, I realized the difficulties I would have to overcome.
One of the first difficulties I faced was working with design and layout. In backend development, I never had to worry about layout of the page, how different components needed to be placed or even small things like padding, margins, and alignment. Making the page visually appealing was more of a hassle than I thought . A simple change in the size would change the whole layout of the page. Never had I thought tiny pixels could change the entire structure.
Another thing that felt new and confusing was the focus on user experience. In the backend, I mainly thought about performance and logic. In frontend, I had to think like the user. Working with components was also a new experience. In frontend, especially with frameworks like React . At first, I wasn’t sure how to split things into components or how they should work with each other. It took some time to understand concepts like props, state, and hooks. They were very different from anything I had used before but slowly the concepts became clear and using them became interesting.
Despite the change in language, working in the backend did help me in frontend. The use of logic to manipulate components like showing or hiding components, the functionality of button clicks were somewhat easier than styling the page. However the real challenge was making everything look good.
Despite all these new challenges, my backend experience did help in many ways. I knew how data worked, how to organize files, and how to debug problems. I was comfortable working with logic, which made frontend easy to some extent. I knew how to break down big problems into smaller ones , a skill that’s useful in both backend and frontend.
As I continued my frontend journey, I also began to appreciate the value of practices and structure not only while writing the codes but also in maintaining the folder structure. Creating reusable components and customizing them according to the need changed my perspective of frontend development. Although the design aspects are still a challenge, understanding how to structure and organize projects became the highlight of my journey.