Journey to the Frontend — Part 1
Being a backend engineer, frontend has always fascinated me. I aspire to start a company, and UI is critical to build great products. In my previous attempts, I have spent time learning react, but I always found myself stuck with details of css to make things look pretty. My interest is to make the system functional. Unwilling to spend ungodly amount of time obsessing about pixels, I decided to pick up webflow. For most of the simple use cases for a new company — like landing pages, blog posts, customer sign up pages — webflow is a perfect fit. The ability to export css consumable by react will help reuse the skillset. Plan is to use webflow to build dashboards for my future products. Webflow, to me, is a means to bridge the gap between me having an idea and building the prototype quickly. This fits well till I am able to get someone with great UI/UX experience on board.
To keep me honest and motivated through the entire process, I joined an accountability group of CMU Alums. It’s a group of highly motivated, quality individuals who share the same passion for growth. In each of our bi-weekly meetings we share our progress towards our 3 month goal. The two outcomes that I will share during our meetings is a blog post documenting the learning, and a project.
As the first project, I have picked up Kubernetes Cheat Sheet website. It will be a collection of useful commands, tips and tricks for kubernetes developers. It’s perfect to try out the important functionalities of webflow — like CMS.Below is a screenshot of the website, which is a work in progress. As you can see, it’s a very basic searchable website, with optional long read which you can access by clicking on the corresponding card.
Before settling on Webflow, I briefly evaluated figma and bubble.io. Both are great in their own way. Figma gives a lot of creative freedom, while bubble.io allows connection with external APIs. Webflow worked best for my usecase case, as I am looking for a tool which helps me build a decent frontend for my apps. Webflow’s css export feature allows me to create UI which can be easily consumed in react application, no translation like figma is needed. Bubble.io provides much more functionality than I want from my UI tool. So chose webflow over bubble.io for simplicity.
The learning from the two weeks of using webflow is as follows —
1. Great for blogs, landing pages, portfolio
2. Use templates to save time
3. Expect to do more design work than squarespace or wix
4. Cost can climb rapidly if you decide to use webflow to host your website
5. Use webflow with other tools like calendly to create great user experience
6. CSS knowledge is helpful. It was easy for me to get a hang of webflow once I figure out how the UI is organized.
