[afloatboat]

As an unhappy front-end web developer I feel I'm mostly unhappy because my job title has stayed the same, while the responsibilities have changed drastically. I've always been a developer that liked to work on the UI. I got joy from creating good looking and feeling components, going the extra mile in terms of small animations and tidbits to make it feel just right. As the years went on JavaScript played a bigger part in that, so naturally I picked that up as well. But I still only learned JavaScript to enhance the visual components that I was building.

Now, n years later I can barely work on the graphical side anymore because most of my time is spent on writing business logic on the client. Fetching data from the server, parsing and massaging it, data management, … So I've basically become a backend developer for the frontend now.

The visual part of the web has been taken over by tools like Webflow and Framer or the other extreme with ThreeJs. I recently talked to some companies/recruiters just to casually see what was available and my desire to go back to the more graphical/ui/ux side of things, but everyone was just looking for a 'react developer', so just the same boat that I'm in now.

So yeah, I power through, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it. I'm also not completely unhappy, but things could definitely be better.