I’m a backender and my main headache is design and front end. I’ve always focused on what the program “does” rather than how it “looks”. But with experience I’ve realized that this is so-so and if I want (and I do) to show my designs to someone other than my cat, I’d better make the app look pretty.
Do you have similar problems? If you have, share how you solved them =)
I’m primarily backend focused as well. I’ve dabbled with Vue and other large JS frameworks which I’ve hated. But what I ultimately chose to use for frontend is HTMX https://htmx.org/ which allows me to focus on the backend and render and serve HTML easily. To gain little flourishes, I’ve paired it up with Alpine JS https://alpinejs.dev/ or just plain ole JS.
The theme was for the frontend I wanted things that provided a lot of power and usability without a lot of distraction, i.e. these solutions each have one page of reference material for their handful of directives, I choose what I need, implement it, and I get back to the backend.
Design wise, I like tailwind but that’s fairly opinionated. I tend to like design so I can usually whip up something fairly quick in tailwind. For more structured solutions, component frameworks like bootstrap provide a lot of value, but hard to customize.
Hope this helps.