Breaking the typecast: Growing beyond frontend and backend labels

Ryan Burgess
Music. All right, welcome to a brand new episode of the front end Happy Hour podcast. In this episode, we have an interesting discussion to cover, mainly around, what's it like to be typecast as a front end engineer, like, how does that affect your career? How does that just affect your role. I think this will be an interesting discussion, and we're joined for this conversation. Tony casparo, staff software engineer at Netflix. Tony, thank you for joining us. I'm excited for the conversation, and it was your topic suggestion. So thank you. Can you give a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your favorite Happy Hour beverages?

Tony Casparro
Sure. Thank you, Ryan and everyone for having me. So I'm Joni caspero. I've been at Netflix for a decade now, which is a long, long time before that, I built some companies so we're successful. Some not worked for some big companies, been through the whole gamut, as far as pharmaceutical companies, e commerce companies, media companies. Media Company be my most favorite. So far, I've been a big movie buff forever. I grew up with my grandparents who loved, loved movies. My Grandma, you taught me how to pirate because she would tape off of she had HBO, and she would tap everything off HBO, and then she would go through the TV Guide, and she would clip out the synopsis, and then tape it onto the VCR. Or no, these are, like, on the Yeah, the tape Yeah. And she had, when we would go to grandma's house, she just had a whole library of, like, every movie ever, all on these VH tests that she had recorded off of HBO. And so being my sister, fond memories of just, you know, watching Good fellas, were you before? We should have been having a great time. That's amazing.

Ryan Burgess
It just like go to grandma's house. Oh, yeah, what she got new from HBO. I

Tony Casparro
love that. That's so cool. And the beverage tonight is what I had in my fridge, which is coke with a little bit of patrol in it.

Ryan Burgess
That's an interesting combo. I don't think I've ever actually tried that. It's

Tony Casparro
the teeny bit of patrol, all

Ryan Burgess
right, fly out of my house. All right. Well, let's also introduce the panelists. Cole. You want to start off. Hi

Cole Turner
everyone. My name is Cole. I'm a software engineer at Netflix, and I love this topic today because I am a front end engineer, but I've also worked on the back end. My

Augustus Yuan
name is August cien. I used to be an engineer on Twitch and to sort of talk. Yeah, I'm super excited for this topic, because coming from Evernote, I was primarily a front end engineer, and then going to twitch, I became a full stack engineer, so I definitely have a lot of thoughts on this topic.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, and I'm your host. Ryan Burgess, definitely excited for this topic. Most of my career has been front end oriented in some way, shape or form. I mean, before there was no front end, I was doing other things, you know, flash and all that kind of stuff. But, yeah, definitely it'll be an interesting conversation just to, like, really think about that, like, what the difference is between it obviously, being a manager and Tony, I know you're a manager at one point as well. You have some insights into some of these things, like salaries, or, you know, the hiring practices, the demand. There's certain things that it will be an interesting topic to cover. But I guess, like, really, where I would love to kind of start is, is it a bad thing? Like, I would love to just even start right off there with all all of you here. Is like, Is it bad to be typecast as a front end engineer? No, okay, so now,

Tony Casparro
don't get me wrong. I love, love front end engineering. I started as a back engineer doing databases and whatnot, and when I found back in the day, we were doing Firebug for debugging whatnot, it was a totally different Yes, front end development and the tools on the front end, the people I've met on the front end, there's such passion, such creativeness. I just went to the React Miami conference, and they had just such great demos. And you always find that really more on the front end. So I love front end. I think the problem is some people feel labeled on the front end, where they never get the opportunities to start doing back end stuff or learning about back end services or trying to expand more. They go, Oh, no, you're just a front end person. And then the other thing that I really don't like about the kind of casting of being a front end engineer is that, like, Oh, it's just so easy. You're just wiring up components on the page. And there's really, it's such a deep, deep level of complexity that you have to really get into as far as far as performance and mobile optimizations. And you know, thinking about latency and whatnot, there's so many very interesting, challenging things. And if you think front engineering is easy, just look at the chrome tools, and look at the depth of the how deep those tools go, with the flame graphs and all these recordings you can get. And you see that there is so, so much more than just wiring up and showing things out of page. We not even talking about actually making good UIs. How do you make something that people enjoy using, that's, that's, you know, a great tool, as opposed to, once again, slapping components out of page. So I think there's a lot to unpack here. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, I love what you said there. I completely agree that, you know. There's, there is this depth that goes with front end. We've talked about this many times on many episodes of front end happy hour, where it's like, you could be a specialist in performance and still be like a front end engineer, or a UX or like, there's just depth in even the types of roles that exist within front end. I do want to come back to maybe your first point, Tony, is around the thing of front end engineers wanting to get back in experience and maybe not being allowed to get that. Or people kind of being like, no, no, you're just front end. What about the reverse too? Like I've seen back end engineers want to learn front end. And sometimes I think I've seen it that way too. We're like, wow, it's different and and so maybe it's like, we just both kind of deal with this is trying to go over the other side of the fence. You kind of get those people that are like, yeah. I mean, you're, you're that front end guy, or you're that backing guy. I don't know, what are your each of your thoughts on that? Well,

Augustus Yuan
yeah. And I just want to echo like, what Tony was kind of saying that, like, you know, there's nothing wrong with being a front end engineer and vice versa. There's nothing wrong with being a back end engineer. It's really like, what do you want to focus on your growth? How do you want to see yourself grow as an engineer? And there's nothing wrong with specializing, and there's nothing wrong with trying to, like, dive into a lot of different things and learning a bunch of scope like, I think anyone's fully capable of doing any of that I do. Like, I have, like, gone through this where, like, you know, my experience is when I came from Evernote to twitch, I came in as a full stack engineer, but they definitely needed me more for the front end, because that's where a lot of my expertise was. I don't want to say I was necessarily typecast, but it definitely is. Like, you know, you the work that your manager assigns you or wants you to take on. They, like, they'll kind of push that, and the team will kind of push that on you too, like they might even rely on you to do that. And that's not a bad thing if you want to grow in, like, a certain way. Like, I think it's kind of on you to try to voice that work with your manager and your team. It's it's definitely going to be a transition process to, like, kind of go through that. But there's nothing wrong with being one or the other.

Ryan Burgess
Augustus. Did you feel like you had to, like, do something, like, push extra hard to get back and work? Or, like, how did you approach that? Because, like, that might be a good thing to just even get insights into how you approach that.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, yeah, that was, like, something I definitely, like, sat down with my managers a lot about how, like, hey, I'm interested. And, you know, just really talking with my team, like, trying to get very involved. And really, it starts with just, like, going to meetings, like, I like, I'm pretty fortunate that when I worked at Twitch, which is part of Amazon and and a lot of big companies, have this, like a writing culture of tech specking everything. Do you learn so much in those kinds of meetings, the discussions, and you'd be, and I want to say that you'd be surprised, as a front end engineer, how much you can contribute to those kind of discussions. I don't want to type cats back in engineers in any way, you know, but like, when you design an API, you have to really understand your consumers, and sometimes that even means understanding how it's rendered in the front end, like, is it going to be paginated? Is it going to what does the UI even look like for this? And those kind of things you can kind of bring up in those meetings really help you, like, get more involved in those discussions. And you can kind of slowly work your way there. Definitely, for me, when I sat in those meetings, I slowly, kind of got more involved, and I kind of worked my way from the front to the back, like, okay, hey, you know, these are the components that I'm designing and building. I'd really like to take on some of, like, the API layer work like, it's just like, you know, like the front end is calling the back end. I can just set up those endpoints, and you can just slowly work your way there.

Tony Casparro
The other thing is that even if you can't get exposure to those meetings, which are really helpful, a lot of times, I'm learning on the side. And so when I picked up node, it was just like, I'm interested I'm gonna learn on the side. Maybe there's not an opportunity for me to work right now at work for it. And by doing that work on the side, actually building some stuff, trying it out, and then bringing it back in, go, hey, I can do the back end for this. I can do these things. I've already learned it. You get those opportunities because you're already ready and kind of ramped up, and you just kind of need this small little like, Okay, here's how we do it. Here, perfect. You're good to go. And so by bringing those in, you bring a lot of expertise that maybe you couldn't get on the job, and you grow that skill set, which is really important, something

Cole Turner
that I like, that I hear both of you saying, which is, when you have exposure to systems that are outside of your regular discipline, you start to be able to connect the dots from your layers into those other layers, and you can bring a certain perspective that only comes from looking at your vantage point. And it's not that front end engineers are better than back end engineers, and it's not vice versa. I did like that earlier. Tony said that there's often said that front end engineering is easier. And there is this myth that it is easier, and I want to break that down for one second. I will say the bottom floor of front end engineering is a lot easier because it's a lower level of just putting together designs, getting a UI out there. But what most people overlook is that UI engineering is you're building an entire client, an entire runtime, and I will say having gone from front end to back end, back to front end at Netflix, front end engineering is infinitely more complicated, and it is because you have to build against the state of the world. You're building against data sources that you have no control over. You don't have a sandbox like you do if you're building a service, where you can mock out your stores or write your integration tests just against your service alone. When you build UIs, you're actually building for 1000s of systems. You're building for devices like Android, for iOS. I like the clouds for performance, because these are things that we often have to think about in different ways. When I started in front end, it was often about network performance, and then how much can you shuffle onto the device at one point. But then moving over into back end, it's often about scale of CPU and how much we can calculate at one given time. So really, these are completely different disciplines, and to even compare them is like comparing, I don't know, music, to paintings. I like

Ryan Burgess
that analogy. So

Tony Casparro
circling back for your Ryan, you know, you asked a question like, Is it bad to be typecast as a front end engineer? We all agree, front end engineering is amazing. It's deep. It's really, really enjoyable. I think the bad part comes when Cole you've mentioned it. You know, when your manager just thinks in their brain UI project, that's Tony, and they don't even consider you for the things. That's the really hard part, when you just kind of get labeled in somebody's head as that's all you know, and that's your only skill set. And so as much as we love the front end, sometimes we do want to break out. I think we want to be a full stack engineer, and we just kind of have to break that stereotype to go like, No, I know this thing I've been learning database on this database on the side. I know these things Put me in coach. I can do a lot more than this, and just kind of constantly raising that visibility for yourself. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
I think the key thing there, Tony is, like, if you do want that, it's like, you know, like you mentioned, I went learn things on the side, or, you know, just so that I could understand a new technology, but then you have to be vocal about it too. Is like, have that conversation with your manager and say, like, I want some opportunities around that. And I think that's like, the most important thing, and it may take time. It doesn't just happen overnight. Like I can think of many times that engineers have come to me on my team asking for experience doing something. I remember the one woman, she moved from being like a test automation engineer to being like an Android UI engineer, and, like, working, you know, in Kotlin on Android. And it was so cool to see that transition. But it was like, how do we do that? Like, how do we take your existing role that we need you for, and how do we start to give you some of that exposure, it, I think it's doable, but you have to have those conversations. I think that's the biggest takeaway there. And then there's also people who are just comfortable. They want to be on the front end. They're like, I love the web. I want to work on the front end. You know, that's great. Like, do that. There's also opportunities. Like, I think of, you know, I mean, sorry, August is here, the one who hasn't worked at Netflix, but a lot of us working at Netflix have had the opportunity to work on even platforms like TV, right? That was a different type of front end. And you know, it's still JavaScript, it's still react, but it's different. There's a lot of lot of constraints on the TV that are a lot different than the web. And so even engineers on the team would be like, I would like to try that. And then there's other engineers, nope, stick to the web. I love that, and that's cool, too. So I think, I guess, to my point here is I really just wanted to say that it's like, it's okay to stick to one of those. And I think we've said that before, but just really want to hammer that point, and then to have the conversation like, if you do want more or try something more, see what's possible and how you can do that.

Cole Turner
I love that you said that Ryan, and I want to connect it to something Augustus said earlier, because this his story resonated with me. It happened to me at Netflix as well. What you're saying is getting access to those conversations and just trying it. I got experience to Netflix's back end, the microservice architecture gateways that normally would just be beyond my layer. And it was great. While I was doing it, I really enjoyed it, but I missed UI. And I think one of the biggest difference about building UI is you're actually physically seeing the end result. You're responsible for more of the end to end. Here's how you gather data, here's how you present it, and it's just they're different disciplines, like back end people you're working with endpoints. And I will say, as much as we talk about how back end people don't understand front end, they do a great job of having a cross platform perspective, because when you work on the back end, you're. Supporting different UI

Ryan Burgess
clients. Well said, Cole. And also I want to call out I love Cole's journey too, because as you got exposure to all the back ends and services, microservices on that side of the fence, it's like coming back to the UI now you just bring all that depth and knowledge. And I think that that's so beneficial too. So it's like, I guess another thing to call out is like, go try other things. It's okay, and you build up that repertoire. And like I've done back in engineering, it wasn't for me, but I do feel like it made me a better front end engineer, just and especially a better partner with a back end engineer. So I think there is room for you to explore and try different things and not be typecast, or just be like, No, I actually want to be typecast as that front end engineer. I'm going right back to that. You just built some more knowledge Tony, being a manager, and then going back to as a like an IC individual contributor, I think is awesome. Like, I've seen so many people do that, and they're like, I kind of want to go back, and I think you're a better engineer for it too, because Tony Casparro you now understand more depths of management. And I think all this is like good to kind of get exposure to different areas, especially going from a I used to do a manager, you see things at a completely different level. As far as, how do you think about Project Scheduling, how do you think about delivering, or kind of meeting expectations for your peers and whatnot? And so when you go back down to a IC from that manager role, you're thinking at both levels now, how do I do things from an engineering perspective, and how do I relate things to my manager? How do I understand what's important to him or what he needs for deliverables to his peers? And then a real like Nicole said, I had the same journey at Netflix. I started out on the website team. I helped build out a node runtime team for back end stuff. And I go, I said, backend is okay, I've done this before. It's not as complex and it's interesting as the front end. So I'll go back to being a, you know, full stacker front end engineer now on open connect, and it's just so much more fulfilling to think about. As Cole said, you have the depth of all the devices you have to know about. You have to think about the user journeys, not just, you know, spitting out an API. There's so much more richness to the front end. That's I missed it too much just being on the back end. So I'm very happy to be a full stack engineer again.

Cole Turner
I will say I do not miss the back end on call like being on call for the back end is always harder than the front end, like the front end, it's usually a data issue. It usually is like we push clients and they're the worker. They don't and if they don't work, we roll them back, we deploy a fix. But I just remember being on call for Netflix's back end and you get paged at two or three in the morning, because people are just attacking you. They're attacking old scripts. They're attacking older devices. It's really interesting. I think from this conversation, one thing that really stands out to me is there is no one right way to be cast as an engineer. Really, you want to kind of go deep on one particular area, I think, and then kind of branch out from there, like, I think they call it, like the T shape. So you pick a specialty, like front end, and then you branch out, like Augusta said, where you go into, like APIs, or like Tony said, you go into the back end, or to databases, and then that's how I feel, is, once you have a solid T shape, you know that you can really go anywhere you want from there. It's

Tony Casparro
interesting. You mentioned about, like, specialization and whatnot. It's, I think it's something that apps have seen people do. And as far as whether or not it makes you a more valuable engineer, it's tough to say, you know, thinking about both the manager perspective and the IC perspective, I think it is really fulfilling when you're like, I'm the guy who knows flame graphs really well. I understand performance to a T, but when we start talking about, like, does that make you more valuable? I think you have to have really, really specialized now, I'm not saying don't do that, but it's also the thing to keep in mind where, if somebody's kind of going like, oh, I have to know this one thing really, really good to get, like, my paid month or whatnot, that might not be the outcome you're looking for. That's more I've seen people do that, that just love it, like they have such a heart for ratcheting or all kinds of, you know, automated testing and whatnot, and they get really deep into it, and that just because they love it so much, and that's the right reason to get those specialties, yeah,

Ryan Burgess
and I think it doesn't hurt to have those specialties and even just love and be like, in them. But I think Tony, like, what you're getting at, even not, they called it specifically out. But like, it's also just like, you might not be needed as much, right? Like, you know, if you're looking for a job, it's not like they're gonna have, you know, a ton of those roles at every company that's so specific to your niche, it's out there and like, you can definitely go deep on it, but yeah, I think it does help to have more more of what Cole said, where it is that T shape, where it's like, yeah, you can go deep, but you can also go have that breath.

Augustus Yuan
I just, I really love how you brought that up, Cole. And this might be a hot take, but I think if you want to grow as an engineer. And it gets a senior, you do need to kind of step out of your comfort zone, sometimes your specialty and and, you know, you don't have to be a specialist in all the branches, but I think, you I think every very senior engineer I've met, every solid engineer I've met, has a somewhat high level, good understanding of what is happening around them. Yeah, and that breadth is like, so important. You don't have to know, like, all the like details, you know, be able to code it all, but you should, like, have a really good, high level understanding of stuff. And I think that's why I loved making the transition to full stack. Like, I still love front end. I still do a lot of front end, but like, I would never I like, if I had to go back and choose, like I would, for sure, like, want to do it all again, because you learn so much. And I would say it makes me a stronger friend and engineer, assuming I choose to do that specialty, it makes me think so much more about like services, the load they handle, like how clients call services like, just that flow, like, really helps me as an engineer, absolutely.

Cole Turner
Because if you think about it, you can write better UIs that respond to what you've observed on the back end. You know how to engage with your back end partners on what requirements you're looking for. And then if you need to, you can zoom out of your layer and look at the bigger picture and say, Hey, there's a problem here, there or there. And I absolutely agree. I think everybody should start with some kind of specialization. And since we're talking about front end, that is often UI, it's really hard to specialize in anything other than UI from the start, unless you're deep technical on infrastructure and you obsessively love Webpack, I don't, but if you start with UI, then I think some of the calls we've talked about today, like Augusta saying, go check out APIs, because that's the integration part of your of your back end. And then once you get more familiar with APIs, you can start to explore the runtime itself of the back end, such as databases or compute, and then from there, you can really figure out what you want to do next. And that's the beauty of it, is it doesn't pigeonhole you into one thing. If you decide you don't like to do it, you can go back to writing UIs, and like Augustus, you will be a better engineer for

Ryan Burgess
it well. And have any of you regretted doing that where you tried something completely different. Tony the article, oh, the on call, very off call, yes. So

Tony Casparro
seconding what Augusta said about getting that perspective of having just even tried doing back end work for a while, even if it's at the API layer that makes you a better front end engineer when you're talking to your back end folks and building that relationship. Hey, I need this for my you know, contract. I need these kind of, you know, pagination or whatnot. And you're, you're clearly understanding where they're coming from, which is huge, because if you just say, I need some data, and you have what kind of data? How do you need? What you have no idea. It's so much better when you can write the spec, you know, for them or with them, and coach. This guy's a great engineer. I love working with him. He always writes these great docs. We never have to go back and forth and, you know, redo work. He just understands where I'm coming from on the back end layer, and that helps me build a better database, a better caching layer, and a better API for him to consume. That's great partnerships. You're going to be asked to work on new stuff again.

Ryan Burgess
I call that, you know, something else. I want to circle back to earlier in the episode. I think it came up around, like, the front end stereotypes and the misconceptions. We said we've covered a few of them, like, Hey, we're not just writing, you know, some small components. Like, there's more complexity to it. But I'm curious, like, Have we missed some stereotypes or misconceptions, or, you know, those? Like, we all hear them, like, that's the certain things that get said. I'm curious of any ones that you've heard and like, agree or disagree that front end engineering is both easy and not worth the money? Yes, all

Ryan Burgess
right, okay, I've heard, yeah. I've heard similar to that. She's

Tony Casparro
like, we can just get somebody from Fiverr to slap some stuff on a page. Like, go ahead, I'll love to see it in a year. We don't need to pay that much.

Ryan Burgess
You know what I've learned with anything it's like, whether it be a plumber, electrician, I don't care, like anyone that you pay that knows that really well, that skill set. They've done it time and time again, they've dealt with the like, you know, issues that come up, or they just foresee things. They're faster, they're more aware, they're thoughtful in how they approach things, all those things, it's like you hire for the experience and depth, and it's same thing with the engineering side of it is, like there's too much across the entire stack for someone to really know everything, it's just impossible. And so when you have these specialties, like, Yeah, I think that's an important one. So yeah, good call on that one Cole that is definitely one that pops up. One that I was going to bring up too is, I feel like I don't know, I don't know if I. Agree with this one so much, but I've heard it many times, is compensation that, like back end engineers are paid more than UI or front end. I think it can vary, but I'd definitely be curious on all of your thoughts.

Tony Casparro
Okay, I have thoughts on though, all right, I've seen the data. I believe it's true that they get paid more, and my theory is not because that role is worthless. I think it's just because there happened to be more people that love front end and it is easier to pick up than back end stuff. And so there just simply is more and so supply and demand, I think they're both equal, equally valuable. There just happens to be more front end people. That's my personal take on it. I like that take. I hadn't really thought about it in depth, to be honest. Like I've seen the data as well. And I think it, it does actually vary sometimes over the years too. So maybe there is companies having more demand for it at some point in time where it's like, I have seen, you know, it's sometimes it's like, almost at the exact same, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower. So it'd be interesting too. It's like, maybe you're right with it's like, this demand thing that really changes. That compensation.

Augustus Yuan
I really like that take Tony. I felt, I feel like, if someone told me that, it's like, oh, that kind of makes sense. I guess one thing I'll add is like, sometimes, like trying to find the best way to phrase this. But I know certain companies will have different job families and so like, you know, back end engineer, front end engineer. And I know there is this kind of very strange gray area where there's like, front end developer, someone who works on websites, versus a front end engineer who works on the actual core application, building components and integrating the API. And sometimes that can get kind of, I don't know, sometimes the company doesn't have the distinction of that line or something like that. I think it's really up to the company, but it's also on the company to make it very clear. What is this distinction between those where you fall into that, and why

Cole Turner
I think Augustus, you kind of rounded out the issue for me, like there's multiple components to this, where there's different scales in how companies do compensation. The smaller the company, the more likely they are to just think out on their own box. But these larger tech corporations, they often have job families, like you said, Augustus, and I recall when I switched job families at Netflix, my compensation increased dramatically solely just by changing teams, just by changing job families. However, that did reset me in terms of where I was. I was at the top of my skill set as a UI engineer, move it into a entry level distributed systems position, whereas my other co workers, who are more seasoned, we're making well over but the point is, the way that these job families work is, you're right, it's harder to hire for a expert, seasoned distributed systems person, because Most people can just get a Rails app off the ground. To go beyond a Rails app to scale to the level of like these tech corporations or bigger companies like Google, Amazon or Netflix, you have to be able to run 1000s of machines and make sure that your code is performing on each one of these and having been on interview panels, UI engineering is pretty easy to gamify for the interview, but having been on back end interviews, you have to write performant code, and it is often benchmarked, and the evaluation frameworks actually are a bit more scrutinized, I think, from what I've seen. But I think this does play into what was said earlier. Front end engineering, the barrier of entry is just lower. And that's a huge that's

Ryan Burgess
super interesting, cool, like, I hadn't thought about even like the interview, or the like bar of entry on something like that. Definitely not surprised on the compensation for times when it's, you know, it's like, yeah, you're changing roles. And that's, can Jeff definitely impact your comp, hopefully, for the positive? Usually, that's what it is. But yeah, that's, I'm just kind of, yeah, interested the fact that I hadn't thought about that one too much, so that's good. Any other stereotypes that we're missing. I

Augustus Yuan
don't know how prominent of a stereotype this is, but I've just seen this. Like, if you like, there's this, like, obsession for front end engineers to be obsessed with accessibility and a lot of other things, and accessibility is super important. Like, do not get me wrong, but every feature, I think, everything, there's a compromise, right? Like, how many users are you watching too? Are you doing an experiment? It's tough. It's not always like you need to prioritize every single little thing that is within the scope of front end also, also, like being a front end engineer, that you are an expert in literally everything that is in the realm of front end engineering. And, like, accessibility is a very, very niche thing that, like, there is, like, a lot of specialization. There with ARIA types and stuff, and I don't know off all of it, off the top of my head, but I definitely feel like there's just this assumption that, Oh, you do front end engineering, you must know, like, what it is how this screen reader will read this thing on this page. That's definitely not true, and or at least for me, yeah,

Cole Turner
I love that Augustus. And I quickly want to mention that reminded me that people often say that front end engineering will be replaced by AI, but nobody is reaching to say that back end engineering will be replaced by AI. You know, yeah,

Ryan Burgess
I don't think either of them will get replaced. It's

Cole Turner
hard to tell, right? Like, yeah, predict the future.

Ryan Burgess
No, I but I don't believe that AI is going to replace front end or back end. Like, I think that it's like, it's may replace parts of your job, like, where there's something that you're like, oh yeah, this can generate the component really easily, and I can, but then you're gonna have to pick up some pieces on top of that. It's like, we've seen that with any of the tools that we've had in our tool belt for many years, everything makes something a little bit easier, but actually sometimes more complex too. Like, you know, it's like you mentioned Webpack. Cool, that one, you know, it can add a lot of complexity. Well,

Cole Turner
Augustus also mentioned accessibility too, and that's why I went to AI, is you can use AI to do that specialization like i It's not that. I think the that people are, what they're saying is true that AI will replace front end engineering, but I think to Augustus point these specializations that are normally just a few experts i AI is going to make that so that we can all do that. I'll give an example. Since copilot and all this stuff has come out, I have found that I'm reaching for AI to ask questions about Webpack configs, about, hey, what unit tests Am I missing from this suite? So I like that it can be applied to specialization. That

Tony Casparro
is really cool. Cool. That was one of my favorite things, too. Of like, just like, what unit tests Am I missing? I was like, oh, that's genius. Like, you know, just like, it's like, basically just someone checking over your work, and you're like, thank you. AI for doing that. So that that was a genius one I like. And my my favorite is regular expressions. I like regular expressions. But there's sometimes where I'm like, I have no idea if this is, like, a look ahead three plus a three, but they expect, like, I have no idea, and it's just so much fun to be like, Hey, Mike, this is a great expression for me. And then you test it. Make sure it works, of course, or you can have aI test it. But there's some things where it's just automating. You know, it's funny, for the longest time I didn't use the dictation feature on my computer, and yet, an m2 or m1 has an amazing, amazing dictation feature. And I all the time since I'm working home, double tap, start the audit, like the dictation, and I'm talking to the code, write this, this, this, move this over here. And I don't miss typing at all. So I'm hoping that AI especially what has helped me, like with all the boring stuff of typing out my commands and whatever, and we're not a function that does this, this, this perfect input, that great. And then I'm simply doing the mastermind architecting the entire thing, which is the most fun part, as opposed to just write about code. That's

Ryan Burgess
kind of cool concept. I hadn't really thought in depth on Tony. It's like, you know, you're basically just, yeah, you're, you're pseudo coding, right? Like, it would be like, if you were just working with a fellow engineer and you're kind of talking through, like, how to build some function or whatever, you're not going to write it out perfectly on the whiteboard, but you might do that and and you're both speaking the same language, right? Like, you're like, Yeah, I totally get it. I don't need the exact syntax to make it perfectly. I get it. And that's what's happening with the AI. That's, that's really cool. I really like that one. Tony Casparro It's good. That's my favorite part. Of course, the my favorite, favorite thing is that I paid English ever since I was in school. I hate writing letters. I hate writing draft AI writes all my stuff for me, and then I, of course, edit it and change things how I want. But sometimes words are hard. My I won't even tell you my SAT scores, but they're abysmal for writing. And that is my favorite thing about AI. Is write this paragraph for me. Here's what it should have inside of it. Perfect. Thank you so much. You're my favorite new toy of the world.

Ryan Burgess
Make it more clear, more concise. Like, I love that, yes, like it's it helps with that various so I like with the code I do the final orchestration.

Tony Casparro
I'll move this paragraph over here on Yep. So we hear, change these words, boom. You've been a co author with me on this, and just helped me get to that finish line, just much faster, because also the same tools we're seeing are generating movies, music, all kinds of stuff. Now it's kind of helping with that creative process. Yeah, fun time. Really fun time. And sometime like I, of course, of course, when I first saw the demos, I was like, Oh, my God, I'm out of a job. And then, and you go, like, Okay, this is more. This is this is somebody working with me. I now have somebody proofreading for me, helping me test, helping me automate, helping me do my accessibility checks and whatnot. And that's a really, really exciting thing, part of and know, like, yeah, it's not coming to replace many times, yeah. I

Cole Turner
agree. And just real quick, everything that, to me, adds up is like, Augustus is saying, like, there's all these specialties that only a few people can do. We're saying, Hey, I can't really replace front engineering, but it can do all these things to help us write tests. And, like, even for me personally, I've used it to write documentation. And like, you're saying, Tony, it's really awesome at structuring information in a way that is easier to digest than having 10 different voices try to write documentation. And then one other quick thing is, if you've ever worked in front end abstract syntax trees, if you're using code to write other code, things like that, are so deeply technical. I remember being able to do it in regular JavaScript, but then when I tried to start doing it in TypeScript, I was like, What the hell's going on? So I just pulled up chatgpt, and I said, Hey, using the TypeScript compiler API, how do I write this code? And it gave me the exact factory functions I needed, saving me hours of trying to learn TypeScript abstracts and text trees, and that's the power of AI. It. It takes that special lift. It's almost like you're either drinking a rental and you have wings, or you feel just a little bit lighter because it's helping you with that. I love that. So now I just picture like the new AI slogan is, like, has wings, like Paul, like, just that's all I'm picturing. Maybe before we dive into pics for this episode, we've given some really good advice, I think, on, like, what it's like to maybe be a, you know, typecast as an engineer, how to avoid it, how to try to, you know, learn a new skill. But are there any last piece of advice that you would like to share with our listeners, before we dive into pics,

Tony Casparro
I got one more good one, which is that even if you're going to focus on the front end, soft skills are a huge part of your job. You don't have to be the guy that they just hand stuff to you and you build it and do a really great job of it. You can be the guy in the conversations with PMS and designers speaking up about, hey, what happens when the user enters this situation? Maybe we should consider this idea. Hey, let's try this alternative to it, and being the person who speaks up and can sometimes even run projects, right? Hey, I'll take this on. I'll own it. I'll coordinate the meetings. I'll get this going. I'll work with the PM. We'll get the data, and you can be a leader as a UI engineer still, and have greater impact. Great opportunities to work with other people, growing and learning skills about, you know, data science, engineering, PM, designing stuff and still be a great front Gen engineer. So soft skills, huge communication, getting yourself out there and building that overall brand is great.

Ryan Burgess
I love the soft skills call out. I hate the word soft skills. It's like, almost like, one, I don't know, like, what if I use their fears like it's essential,

Augustus Yuan
yeah, good. What do you call them essential skills? Yeah, yeah. But it's like, I mean, yeah, I'll throw hands, but yeah, it's, I'm but I'm so glad Tony called it out because of, like, yeah, those are critical skills that can just someone needs to do it right, like someone needs to do the play those roles. Sorry, any other advice?

Augustus Yuan
Oh, Tony actually really hit it. Hit it well. But I think one thing to add, which is an essential skill. This is, this was something that actually helped me transition also, because once you're like, you know, one thing to understand is, like, it's hard for a manager to let you maybe learn, and which is why learning outside of your job is super important. It's super hard for them to like, you know, you have a project that's very critical. And, you know, they there's a deadline, ideally, they want you to work on the UI. And you know, this is like a really great opportunity for to step up and mentor others on your team to help them grow in front of engineering. And I think you'd be surprised how many people would be interested, or how many teams want and need, like all of the engineers on their team, to be kind of able to do everything you know, like you don't want, I don't want to say bus factor, because that's that's a great picture, but you don't want to be the single point of failure when it comes to resourcing. And this is actually what helped me. Like, I would help edge train, other engineers in front end, get the familiar, and they would help me get familiar with the back end. And, you know, we would help each other, and the whole team gets better in that way. So that, I think that is, like, such an important way, if you are a very strong front end engineer and you want to explore other things like that is a great way to, like, get yourself out there.

Ryan Burgess
Great advice. I guess this sounds awesome.

Tony Casparro
I got one more. One more. Go for it. Yes, this is a podcast, but I'm wearing a hack day shirt. So if you you're learning on the side, and you can't get your boss to show something because it's a side project, he doesn't care about do a hack day. I got this, you know, I've been learning on the side, and I've seen this hole in our. System. I'm gonna do a hack day to show off some of my back end skills, database skills, whatever. And now you're bringing your boss, not just I've been learning on the side, but hey, I did this thing for one day. Look at the this hole that I filled, and show off like and your boss will absolutely see like, whoa. This guy's got some skill beyond what I thought he could do. He's delivering something that is, is something that is amazing. So doing a little hack day for yourself to do that is a huge opportunity.

Ryan Burgess
I love that too. And I'm going to add on to that one as maybe the last piece of advice too, because I like that Tony is also maybe even like it sounded like you would almost just kind of go do it, or like, as a hack day, which is totally fine. But I think also bring it up with your managers. Like, Hey, I've noticed there's this opportunity here. Can I have just, you know, some spare cycles to work on that too? Because, like, you know, I think some of me definitely, when I was earlier in my career, would have just been like, I'll just go home and do that in my evening and, like, you know it, and which I probably would still do again, because I loved, you know, what I was doing, but I think also it's like there's probably room for that just actually on the job too, is just like, I'd like to try that, just to fix that one hole that I saw and just prove that value. But I love that cool well, let's dive into pics. In each episode the front end Happy Hour podcast, we like to share things that we found interesting with all of you. Gusta? You want to start us

Augustus Yuan
off? Sure, yes, I have two picks. So somewhat related to the topic. One is a YouTube channel called Jordan. Has no likes. It's, it's a guy who used to work at Google, and he basically just does deep dives into system design. I think his channel is really geared towards helping people with system design interviews. He's pretty knowledge a lot and pretty well. He's pretty funny in how he describes that, but he does a really great job of breaking down, like, pretty complex systems, like recommendation engines or like, even, like, popular things, like Kafka and other, like, very modern components, frameworks, etc, keep, yeah, and I just think it's a great resource for people to check out. And especially if you're front end and you're trying to get more into the back end, like, I think I highly recommend them. And then my second pick. I can't remember if we picked this. I'm pretty sure we haven't. But there is a website called can I use where you can know, like browser compatibility. I found out there is a website called Can I email.com which is, I'm sure, Ryan, do you remember, like when you build email templates with CSS, there's a very limited subset of things you can use in emails. And very similar to can I use this Can I email.com? Shows you what you can use for different email applications. So I thought that was like, I would have loved that in the past. I don't know when it came out, but great resource.

Ryan Burgess
I don't think I knew that one's around. And honestly, like, yeah, I don't want to touch Email expert. Like, it's like, Do you know what I mean? It's just like, one of the most frustrating things, like we talked about front end on this episode. Well, there's like, specialties in that. And I'm like, No, I'm not doing that one. I hope they're done with table layouts. Like, I haven't written an email, like, HTML email in so long, but still, like, it's so old, like, it's just feel for anyone that's had to deal with email. HTML email, it's not fun.

Cole Turner
I don't think we can call it front end engineering. It's so different. It like, it, yeah, it's

Tony Casparro
like, it gets lumped in a coal I agree with you, though it's like, I don't think we should call it that, because it is so different and so unique. It's a huge unique skill set. It's completely different. I love that. Tony, what picks do you have for our episode? I have two as well. The first one is, I've been trying forever to find a tool that helps me kind of organize my mind. I'm trying to sit in and task paper all these things. But the one I love the most, and they're a small company, I really hope they don't go to business, is called workflowy. It's workflow with a Y at the end, and their whole spiel is infinitely nested lists. Now, why this is neat is, at a top level, you just kind of have, like, those little, you know, bulletin boards whatnot, but you can put an infinite amount of detail under each and everything automatically collapses. And so underneath you can put videos and images and whatnot. And I have my entire life organized in there, as far as, like, this is, you know, books I want to read one day. And these are projects that have going on, and everything is collapsed, which is nice and small for my kind of overall perception of everything. For example, I have my like to do list, and it shows, boom, boom, boom, boom, but without getting all the detail mixed in. And then when I want to work on something, I click the dot next to it, it fades away all the rest of the bullet points, and just that one opens up in that space. And I love. I think it's so great organization, and I use it for everything. The other one is for whatever reason. I never got into comic books. I thought it was dumb and stupid and whatnot. And now, a little later on my life, I've discovered something called manga, which I had never experienced or tried before. And the first one I read was something called Death Note, which I thought was like, Okay, this is some story about some guy and some book. When I Netflix has a show about it and whatnot, and I am enthralled. I'm midway through the series right now. I bought the whole black edition, you know, so I'm actually reading it on real paper, and it is intriguing and interesting, and I love the imagery, whatnot. And so I'm having a ton of fun reading Death Note. And I think it's one of the most amazing mediums of conveying stories that I've ever just endeavored with.

Ryan Burgess
Very cool I know that one right away I was Augustus definitely has called that out on this, on some one episode. I know you have so

Augustus Yuan
great, fantastic pick, Cole.

Ryan Burgess
What do you have for us? Wait, is it your turn around?

Tony Casparro
Yeah, I could go, Okay, I'll go. I'll let you have the end, I just have one pick for this episode. Maybe it's because I've just been relaxing, enjoying life, not ordering, but I bought a hammock a little while ago, a few months ago, I bought it more for my son. And I'm pretty much probably using it the most. It's great. I mean, he still uses it, but it's, like, this really great stand. It's a Brazilian hammock. It's awesome. Like, it was just a little stand that holds it up. It's, like easy to move or fold up, which is cool too, but I'm thoroughly enjoying having a hammock super relaxing. So that's my pick.

Cole Turner
I'm glad that you clarified that it was a family sized hammock, because up until you clarified, I was obsessing that it was a kid sized hammock that you were occupying, and I imagine that.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, I don't do it. If you could hold me, I would probably still try and swing that. It would, you know, it's like, all right, it's fine.

Cole Turner
Well, that's family sized hammock is even better, because, like, you can fit everyone. Well, I

Ryan Burgess
don't know if I can fit my entire family. I feel, I feel like it's, like, it can hold like, 300 pounds or something like that. So it's, I think you've got, like, maybe two adults you could probably fit on there, like, then adding the kids and stuff, it might add up fairly quickly, random. That's cool. Yeah, cool. Cool. Uh, what kind of picks you up for the episode? Hey everyone. So

Cole Turner
today I have a special pick since, uh, we've been talking a lot about AI. My pick is this. I'm going to hit play. My pick today is related

Music
to conversations we've had on this podcast so many times about AI. Basically, I get upset with this tool constantly. It lets you write songs and script the musical production. You really don't need to know anything about music song, But you can ask them nothing they say. Is to speaking from happy hour.

Ryan Burgess
I love it. That's very good. Yeah. Oh, nice little cheers at the end too.

Cole Turner
Yeah. So I used suno.com to generate that clip. It only took about 20 minutes. I've studied some lyrics, I made a few tweaks, and if you want to check it out. It's super awesome. I loved it.

Ryan Burgess
That's impressive, like that. It's just like, 20 minutes plugging in, you know, just giving it some prompts, like you didn't have to do any like putting any music or anything, or choosing it. It was all generated.

Cole Turner
Yeah, and if you don't like what you're hearing, you just click generate 10 more times until you find something you do, like Carrie, and that's the great part, is you can really make almost anything you can imagine. That's so cool.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, this is like, I love seeing all the various tools that are, like, AI oriented. They're just popping up for anything. And it's like, yeah, why not play with it? That's really

Cole Turner
cool. Yeah, why be typecast as a front end engineer? I.

Ryan Burgess
Well done. Cole, yes, yeah. Cole's career is taking off as an AI musician. Like, is that a thing now? Like, I think we might have to start that. Yeah, I'd love to be aI so I don't have to do it myself. I'm sick of working.

Ryan Burgess
This is a great episode. Tony. Thank you so much for joining us and actually bringing the topic to us. I think this was, like, just a really good way to approach many different topics that we've covered. I think, I mean, we even got to AI, like, it's hard not to get to AI these days, but, yeah, it was really good. Tony, where can people get in touch with you? I'm

Tony Casparro
not big into the social medias, but I'm on Twitter or x as casparo, which is my last name at casparo, but LinkedIn might be a better spot to find what I'm actually working on these days. And thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome, well, and thank you all for listening to our episode. You can find us on social medias of like YouTube at front nhh, Twitter, front nhh. Maybe that's it. I don't know. There's probably other things that we think we have Instagram and stuff too. I think it's front and hh,

Tony Casparro
any last words? Go read some ring. Ding, ding. I.