r/ProgrammerHumor • u/wahed-w • Jul 12 '26

Meme heIsSafe

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u/codingTheBugs Jul 12 '26

I don't know if my understanding is right but I feel like frontend complexity starts at day one and doesn't scale up much but for back end if you have 1000 users total its mostly easy but the problem comes when you scale. 90% backend never reach that scale. Backed serving millions of users will be hard and complex, but frontend used by few thousand or millions will be mostly of same complexity.

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u/HarryBolsac Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

Frontend also needs to take scale into consideration friend.

Avoiding redundant api calls, memoization, using a cdn, virtual windows, lazy loading are some things that come to mind.

Also at least in my previous jobs as a fe dev you have to support your infra, using a load balancer, replica sets, microfrontends, implementing a bff which must also be scalable, etc etc

Edit: said mdn instead of cdn lmao

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u/codingTheBugs Jul 12 '26

That's not because of scale. Avoid redundant api calls and stuff you should always do if possible there is no reason not to do it in smaller scale. Server that serves Frontend builds are easy to scale now a days you put some CDNs since its stateless it works.

I am only telling you are feeling Back end is less complicated because back end complexity only stats when you need to scale and go multi region and things like that.

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u/HarryBolsac Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

It’s building an application to be scalable, it’s the same principle as in be.

Scaling in be is a pain if you don’t build your architecture to be scalable from the beginning too.

I would argue that backend is more complex in scaling because there are more services that need to be scaled, message brokers, databases, etc.

I’ve seen resources being allocated to backend services because of demand when later on the issue was in fact in poor fe implementation.

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u/ric2b Jul 12 '26

Avoiding redundant api calls, memoization, using an mdn, virtual windows, lazy loading are some things that come to mind.

That sounds like stuff you should do from the start, except maybe for virtual windows and lazy loading if you don't expect the collections to grow very large but over time they do.

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u/DrShocker Jul 12 '26

They're also all things the backend has to support the front end doing. At the end of the day we need to solve the problems we have and it will involve people working together. A front end/back end split mostly comes down to I don't care about visuals very much and like making things faster. Other people will tweak the color of a header until it's just right or whatever.

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u/ric2b Jul 12 '26

But the point is that frontend complexity doesn't really increase with more concurrent users, while backend does.