Day 6 of the Chatbot Challenge - Switching contexts

Switching from Backend to Frontend – Lessons Learned

Today was all about shifting gears. I moved from backend work to focusing on UI, UX, and frontend development. It’s always an interesting mental shift because these tasks require different kinds of thinking. Maybe it even uses a different part of the brain—I’m not sure, but it feels that way to me. It’s not always easy to switch contexts, but using AI tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot really helps. These tools are also pretty good on the frontend side of things.

I did hit a bump today, though. I made a rookie mistake by trying to use the ASTRO framework—fantastic for static websites—for dynamic data. My website is built on ASTRO, and I love it for what it does best. But when I tried to work with dynamic content, like rendering a table, it quickly became clear that ASTRO isn’t designed for that kind of task. It’s definitely more straightforward with frameworks like Vue, React, or Svelte, which I’ll probably jump into tomorrow.

In the end, I lost about half a day trying to make ASTRO work for something it wasn’t built to do. Tomorrow, I’m working with a frontend template I love, which is in ASTRO, but I’ll slowly rebuild the components in Svelte. Luckily, tools like Cursor and Copilot should help make this a smoother process. So yeah, today was just another one of those “failed experiments,” but it’s all part of the journey. Thanks for riding along with me!