I really enjoy doing UI work: being close to the user's mind, thinking deeply about interaction design, and how small changes can massively improve someone's day. But in order to market oneself as a “Front-End Engineer” in the current landscape requires dogged attention to fashion trends, and I'm on Team Evergreen, baby.
Early in my career in web development, I loved reading Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug, but at some point I had to accept that maintaining intimate awareness of the specifics of JavaScript Framework Du Jour was not sustainable for me. Call me "full-stack", that's fine.
Front-end is the most ripe for résumé-driven engineering. Default skepticism is always warranted for new technologies, but in front-end, it is truly a necessity to avoid lighting your company's money on fire.
I found a rather cathartic post by Marco Rogers on Hacker News recently called The Frontend Treadmill. I fully agree with Marco's take:
If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend arguing about it is wasted energy.
I would not necessarily describe myself as a React fan, but I am very happy that it feels like we finally landed on a framework that can survive for several years, with wide adoption by startups and enterprises alike. Let's go, Lindy effect. Maybe React can be the framework equivalent of what jQuery did as a library.
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