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Ask HN: How did front-end and back-end titles get introduced?

1 points by javierluraschi ↗ HN
When and why did we start splitting software engineering into front-end and back-end?

Was there a time when one could have been just a software engineer building websites or did the specialization was there since the beginning of HTML and CGI servers?

From Google Trends [1], it looks like maybe we started using this term in 2010.

My personal recollection: Around 2006 we had new projects like Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and JQuery which enabled additional complexity in HTML/JS. In 2010, angular.js and backbone.js started and helped address a sentiment that JQuery was not good enough for large projects. It became hard for a software engineer to handle the new front-end frameworks while keeping up with the backend as well. So it would make sense to have the front-end engineer title introduced around this time. However, I don't recall if there were discussions or blog posts explicitly introducing it.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=front%20end%20engineer,back%20end%20engineer

4 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] thread
dave4420
> Was there a time when one could have been just a software engineer building websites

No. You would also have had to admin the servers, and fix/replace them when they broke.

javierluraschi
Sounds like you are confirming that there was a time before the split, where it was more common for single person to run front-end and back-end, makes sense! I remember writing PHP at some point and running my own server and it wouldn't have crossed my mind to split the back-end work with someone else. I mean, at times a colleague would do the database, etc. so there was definitely specialization even back then, but it wasn't an explicit front-end vs back-end since we all had the skills to mess around with both.

However, I'm more interested to reconstruct how/when we started splitting into front-end / back-end roles explicitly. Any thoughts there?

ssss11
I feel like it was early 2000’s when JavaScript tools became a thing… jquery and it’s predecessors.

I’ve found in tech that roles are constantly expanding, for many or all areas.

javierluraschi
You remember when you started hearing about front-end and back-end roles? Early 2000's as well?