Imo, 2 relatively recent trends have redefined the traditional frontend/backend developer roles.
1) The rise of thick-client SPAs. Anything that's not a Wix or WordPress website these days is most likely adopting an SPA architecture. You'd think that the decoupling an SPA brings would more clearly define frontend/backend roles, but ironically, the opposite seems to have happened.
My opinion for this is that creating a legit SPA is very complex; state management + other complex topics like packages, build pipeline, etc. Are almost always integrated with the view layer. So a "Frontend" developer must now have a good understanding of JavaScript, well beyond the knowledge needed to render static HTML or change a font's colour with CSS.
And if you know frontend JS well, you basically know node.js too - so what's stopping you from writing server-side code?
2) Emergence of serverless functions. Admittedly, adoption still doesn't appear mainstream. But the ecosystem is growing and greatly reduces the barrier of entry to writing backend code, by doing away with the overhead of managing servers etc.
So there's no reason a dev working with a frontend JS framework wouldn't be able to quickly pick up writing backend code as a serverless node.js function, for example.
Finally, I think other innovations like GraphQL's client-driven queries are further closing the frontend/backend gap. Everyone has to be - to some extent - a full-stack dev these days.
Just my opinion. And I believe it's a trend that will only accelerate
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Imo, 2 relatively recent trends have redefined the traditional frontend/backend developer roles.
1) The rise of thick-client SPAs. Anything that's not a Wix or WordPress website these days is most likely adopting an SPA architecture. You'd think that the decoupling an SPA brings would more clearly define frontend/backend roles, but ironically, the opposite seems to have happened.
My opinion for this is that creating a legit SPA is very complex; state management + other complex topics like packages, build pipeline, etc. Are almost always integrated with the view layer. So a "Frontend" developer must now have a good understanding of JavaScript, well beyond the knowledge needed to render static HTML or change a font's colour with CSS.
And if you know frontend JS well, you basically know node.js too - so what's stopping you from writing server-side code?
2) Emergence of serverless functions. Admittedly, adoption still doesn't appear mainstream. But the ecosystem is growing and greatly reduces the barrier of entry to writing backend code, by doing away with the overhead of managing servers etc.
So there's no reason a dev working with a frontend JS framework wouldn't be able to quickly pick up writing backend code as a serverless node.js function, for example.
Finally, I think other innovations like GraphQL's client-driven queries are further closing the frontend/backend gap. Everyone has to be - to some extent - a full-stack dev these days.
Just my opinion. And I believe it's a trend that will only accelerate