The Visible Part: Frontend

I’ve come to realize that a lot of people, including many of my friends who are also in the field of IT, don’t fully grasp how vast this industry really is. And to be honest, I don't blame them. Because for most people, even those who are fairly tech-savvy, when they hear about "tech", what they think of is a website or an application. And sure that's part of it, you do some coding stuff, handle some state, map out the component trees, sprinkle in some media query or adaptive triggers, and et cetera and so on, and then voilà —this is the best part— you then just hit this magical little button that says upload and boom it's done. Except, it's not... not even close. That's the frontend and that is the only part that you can see.

(And by the way, frontend folks—yes, I’m being sarcastic. I know it’s not that simple. Let me live)

Beneath the Surface: The Underlying Infrastructure

Building a website or an application is just one part of the equation, maybe a third of it if we’re being generous. There's a matter of backend, where the real logic lives. There's API handling, routing logic, rate limiting, input sanitization, database integration, request handling, async operations, and all the errors that we have to go through from hundreds or maybe even thousands of lines of code. Because for every request and for every process needs to be handled correctly, securely, and efficiently. That includes handling all the edge cases for every weird input, every misuse, and for every unexpected behavior. Because all it takes is one small error, one single wrong letter.. and the whole system breaks.

And we haven't even touched the DevOps yet, there are still server configuration we still need to do after the fact. There's load balancing, containerization, deployments, CI/CD pipelines, failovers, scalability, uptime monitoring, etc. all of which are dependent on the type of infrastructure that you're using, is it on-premise, cloud based, or hybrid, all of which has to be setup differently and accordingly for it to work 24 hours 7 days a week.

And that's not all

All of these have to work flawlessly and get integrated seamlessly. together. simultaneously. All fused together. Just so that one click/tap can feel simple and effortless for the end users. And yes, this big 3 is still a generous oversimplification. Because there's still version control, regulation compliance, documentation, billing and budgeting, security concerns, testing, diagrams, and all the other moving parts, you name it.

Final Thoughts

So no, there's more to tech than just building an application or a website and click upload and call it a day. That's just the tip of the iceberg. And ironically, that upload button is something that we have to create ourselves too. Nothing is automatic unless we make it so. It's strategy, it's patience, and a whole lot of "what if this breaks at 2AM?". So the next time you see an application or a website.. just remember that there's someone, somewhere, that made hundreds of decisions that you'll never see behind the scene, keeping it all together. Just to make it look that simple.