Micro-frontends and beyond: composable frontend applications

Hi folks! It's been a while I don't post here, and there is a reason why. Besides being quite busy with work, back in December last year I decided to use part of my vacation to start a website to publish all I've learned over the years about web development, cloud development and architecture. You can visit it at microfrontend.dev

My journey with micro-frontends

I started experimenting with optimized and performant patterns and architectures to ship enhanced frontend applications, when I was a frontend technical lead for a large enterprise platform operating globally. We were maintaining its legacy version, and at some point, we decided to migrate. That's when I started my transition from developer and lead developer to architect. There was a lot going on: we were also moving from on-prem to the cloud. We were shipping a new platform to a new market. The team was growing from 10 to over a hundred. We were maintaining 3 legacy and a brand new code base, dozens of projects mapping to respective business units, and hundreds of localized websites, and we wanted to do it in the most efficient way for the stakeholders, the developers involved, and overall, the end-users. We also had external teams collaborating. It was not an easy endeavour, and I shared part of that adventure in a post that's been one of the most popular I've written in this platform Micro frontends: my lessons learned.

The motivation to build a website about micro-frontends

I spent most of 2020 and 2021 writing and doing public speaking online and on-site, about micro-frontend architectures, and later on, when I joined MongoDB as an architect, about data and how to connect the dots between data sources and the application layer, in the cloud. I visited multiple podcasts, too, and tried to spread as much of my knowledge, gained through experience designing, building and shipping to production, composable architectures in the cloud over serverless and event-driven components.

You can access some of that content here, under Content created by me

But that wasn't enough. I wanted to write a book.

I thought that writing a book would be beneficial for my career. I realized -and still think that it is the case- only published authors are somewhat taken seriously. Especially if you're a woman, it takes you a lot more effort to get visibility and for your opinions and research to be taken seriously.

But writing a book demands you subscribe to a publishers schedule. And I was already plenty busy and meeting deadlines at work; it didn't appear to be feasible. Especially after joining Microsoft to lead the e2e DX for JavaScript on Azure.

This is when I decided to publish a website.

If I don't have time for a book, I'll make it a website

And that's how microfrontend.dev was born. Not before my good friend Wassim bought a domain for me.

Shipping my knowledge and opinions as a website makes them accessible to everyone. And I do believe that's a good thing.

I have debated open-sourcing it, but I would like for the backlog to be completed first. I can't believe it went live for the first time on the 6th of January, and we're already almost in May.

Ever since, it has been visited by people from over 70 countries and hundreds of cities. I hope it's helping folks get a better understanding of some of the technologies, patterns, mechanisms and frameworks explored. I have a lot of pending topics to address, and I hope I find time soon to continue to develop it, improve it and expand on those topics and more.

If you find it useful, please visit it, share it with others, leave a comment here. Do you have topics you would love for me to add? Let me know!

For publishers: I may still be interested in writing that book. Especially now I have most of it put together ;)

More on the subject of composable architectures

If you visit my website and want to know more, I will be speaking at the O'Reilly Architecture Superstream on the 31st of May, precisely on this subject.

As a woman in technologies and a web software architect who's always been interested in innovating, disrupting, finding new ways to architect frontend applications with performance and user experience in mind, and bring professional frontend development closer to everyone, it was very exciting to get an invitation to participate and share my ideas at such a prestigious event.

I wish you all a great week, and hope to hear from you soon!