Ask HN: Do you start from the Front end or the Back end? And why?

3 points by denismenace 2 years ago | 2 comments

When you are building a new product, in the form of a full-stack app (web/desktop/mobile), where do you start?

You could start from the frontend. This way you arecloser to how the product should look and feel, but this might force you to spend too much time on ui details. Also this means that things you might have supposed coming from the backend are not there.

Starting from the backend and the data model might mean that you build something that wont be needed in the frontend.

How do you handle this?

DamonHD 2 years ago |

You should consider "works like" and "looks like" prototypes (which may correspond to back-end and front-end here, and a thin "spike" all the way through ASAP.

In other words there should probably be a number of shards tackled at once to help ensure that you haven't omitted something critical from the design.

mtmail 2 years ago |

Prototyping both at the same time first. Backend only needs to return some static data (e.g. all hardcoded into the script), frontend needs only basic structure. Then immediately ask customer for feedback while interating.