this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Web Development

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As a backend developer, where do I even start with frontend? Feeling major choice paralysis (feddit.dk)
submitted 6 days ago by SorteKanin@feddit.dk to c/webdev@programming.dev
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I'm an experienced backend developer. To me, the backend world seems super simple compared to the frontend world.

It seems like there are a million options and I don't have the experience to say what's good and what's not. I'm hit with major choice paralysis, basically.

I don't have any special requirements - I "just" want to build a pretty standard, responsive, modern-looking UI. Ideally without too much boilerplate, in a framework that "feels good", in a way that might at some point attract other contributors as well, if I get to the point of open sourcing.

Of course I could just reach for the most popular thing i.e. React, but that doesn't seem to be the "hip" thing to use nowadays (or maybe I'm wrong? What do I know, I'm a backend dev).

But even if I choose a framework, there's a million other libraries out there to choose as well. For instance, which UI library to choose? What about observability and state management and authentication and so on?

Sorry if this is a bit ranty. I am honestly just looking for an experienced frontend developer to point me in some direction (i.e. some set of frameworks/libraries; a "stack" if you will), so I can get out of this choice paralysis.

What would be your go-to stack for a new frontend project today?

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[–] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Devographics has been running these popular "State of X" surveys (State of JS, State of CSS, etc) that have been useful for tracking trends in frontend framework usage:
https://www.devographics.com/
https://stateofjs.com/en-US
https://stateofcss.com/en-US
https://stateofhtml.com/en-US
https://stateofreact.com/en-US

The StackOverflow survey is also somewhat useful:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What I'm mostly getting from the state of JS survey is that React is extremely dominant and "good enough" it seems like, for most cases.

[–] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 days ago

Yeah, I'd say that's true. I think the alternatives may be just as good, but React was the first mover in its category, gained and maintained popularity for years, is battle-tested, and the improvements they've made over the years has kept it fresh.

My understanding is that one of the benefits of Svelte, for example, is that it eliminates the virtual DOM abstraction that React uses, so if you cared enough to shave milliseconds off your frontend rendering time for a complex site, then you may want to look into Svelte, but the reality is that React is already very good.

In reality, your choice of framework is usually already dictated by whatever project you're contributing to, and for most fairly modern projects that ends up being React, and sometimes Vue or Angular. Beyond that, I personally just try these new libraries occasionally, build a toy project to see if they solve some pain point that I have, and determine if that is good enough for me to switch or recommend.