I do agree with you!
Maybe I wasn’t too explicit in my article, but I am not saying that being awesome at writing CSS, caring about accessibility and design isn’t enough: these are amazing skills and are absolutely needed in a team.
I work with Mattia Astorino (the person who commented above) and I think of him as an amazing UX Engineer: he is caring about the “visual part”, and I care about the “backend”. I do agree with both of you when you say that we need full stack teams… why? Because as you asked, my CSS skills are not comparable with my JavaScript skills. Full stack teams solve this problem, given the fact that real “full stack people” in 2019 are hard (or impossible) to find.
My article is addressed to developers who don’t want to embrace a change: frontend world is changing quickly and we can’t think at frontend development the same way we did 10 years ago.
I worked with people who mixed jQuery into React or Vue just because were too lazy to understand what a hook is… I mean, we are not coding in COBOL, we should keep studying in order to do this work in the most correct way, am I wrong?
I do understand that frontend is becoming complex… and I believe that we can’t be very good at everything, so we should focus on UX Engineering, JavaScript or whatever… and we don’t have to be shy at asking for help when we need it. That’s what teams do: help each other to do their best.
In 2019, web development is a teamwork.
About static sites generators: they are amazing. I love Gatsby but once again… it was pretty hard to learn! It took some time to me to understand GraphQL and make it work in React! Other static site generator are easier I know… but often “easy” doesn’t mean “good quality”. Like in WordPress: it’s all about your standards: if you want to make awesome websites (performances, accessibility, security, maintainability, testing, scalability): WordPress is not for you. In 90% of the cases, maybe it is a great solution, ’cause you don’t need to respect these standards (I made dozens of WordPress websites).
If you are an Agency and you want to deliver high quality software and user interfaces… you need to respect some standards, and these standards aren’t the same of 2005.
Once again, it’s all about embracing a change: working with Mattia Astorino has been an awesome experience, ’cause I understood how UX Engineers should work and how they can really help Frontend and Backend Engineers to tho their job at their best.
My personal change was focusing on the Frontend Engineering instead of trying to do everything, often making mistakes.
