On Mapping the World of Frontend Development

Published on July 30, 2024, filed under Development (RSS feed for all categories).

I don’t know if you’ve noticed what’s happening on Frontend Dogma, with its frontend news, if you even know the project. Each year since its launch, the site has been featuring 2,000+ contributions to frontend development and the wider field of web development.

There are also things hard to catch, like my work on filling the gap between the 90s and the years since 2020. Yet I’m doing it—I’m wading through this century’s first two decades of frontend development.

That’s something I like to briefly talk about. How do I go about closing that two-decades gap? (How would you go about it? Tell me more!)

Process

The process is simple:

• I start with web development people, organizations, and magazines I have top of mind.
• I check their sites.
  • If still online, great. I work with that.
  • If not, I check the Internet Archive, and look for the last workable site version.
• I work through the site’s overview and archive pages to pick those articles that are relevant and useful for Frontend Dogma.
  • If I notice additional external material that’s relevant, I either handle it immediately or save it for later.
• I link the respective content from Frontend Dogma (hidden, for now).
• I update the status of each site (“in progress”—with a marker where to continue, if need be—or “done”).
• I keep working through and adding to the list.

While that’s simple and straightforward, it’s a lot of work. (A ton. Of endless work.)

Challenges

Furthermore, some aspects of this work are hard:

• Ensuring appropriate representation. How do you make sure you feature authors, organizations, magazines equitably? In a multi-dimensional information space that you do not and cannot know, I’m not sure that’s possible. However, Frontend Dogma is open and impartial, and so I’m always on on the lookout especially for content creators that haven’t been featured yet.

• Identifying a content piece’s exact publication date. This can be really hard—sometimes impossible—, but there are a few techniques to use, and I could write an article about this alone!

  (If you’re a content creator, I’ve shared some tips to make it easier to be featured!)

• Tagging. Frontend Dogma is approaching 600 tags (or topics, as I prefer to refer to them). Tagging well—detailed enough to surface niche topics, broad enough to provide good overviews, not too comprehensive to pull attention away from other information—is an art and a science I feel like I’ve grown to understand a bit, but also feel like I’m still at the mercy of. There’s a reason this is a dedicated field.

Excitement

What makes me excited, however, is this:

• Time. What I’m working on now is just the first sweep, to have a good enough foundation to even start pointing to the 2000s and 2010s. (I’m looking at at least 1,000 posts for each decade.) Once that initial collection was launched, adding content from that time period is going to be regular maintenance work, ideally with the issue of representation shifting over time as well.

• Mapping the world of frontend development is so interesting! It’s archeology, for our own field! It’s hard to describe the blend of boredom and thrill of going through decades-old blog archives, and yet the gems you surface, the banalities you run into, the patterns and parallels you find, the different perspectives you get…—is beautiful. If it turns out the way I think it will, the archives of the upcoming Frontend Dogma—the one including material from all times, not just 90s plus 2020s—will speak for themselves. And they’ll add to the unique view you already get, when learning and following frontend development with Frontend Dogma.

❧ If you’re already following Frontend Dogma (best used by feed, but take note of other options), cool! (Thank you!) If not, also cool—though I hope this post gave you some ideas about why it might be interesting to follow, too. (Thanks for considering!)

For everyone who thinks this is a project worth supporting a bit more, check out Frontend Dogma’s books as well as Frontend Dogma on Open Collective. This helps me do all this work and provide all the information at very low prices, even for free, and may help to do even more.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m somewhat close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you’d like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback, so that I can make improvements. Thank you!