As I have made clear in my previous essays, I am an Engineer first and a Computer Scientist second. I am very unfamiliar with front end development and approach it with the suspicion of a warry explorer.
At that point I had realized that this was not the way the assignment was completed and resigned myself to restarting using more Bootstrap 5 elements, and boy what a difference it made!
What took me 15 hours in total was accomplished in 20 minutes with clever use of Bootstrap elements and it was more functional than the first version. Thus, I am forced to take back what I said about UI development. It's not AS bad as I had initially set it out to be, however there is still a very steep learning curve. Thankfully, Bootstrap (if used correctly) helps alleviate some of that pain. There are still many problems facing front end development (at least in my opinion). Chief of which being appearance. It's called front end for a reason: It's the front of the project, the first thing a user sees when they interact with the program. Whether it be a website, an application, a vide game, or even a picture book, the front end is always the first thing a user is met with when they interact with your project. First imressions are important! Better make it count. You could have the smoothest, most efficient code, but if the UI is clunky and unweildy, no one's going to want to use it.
It's because of this that front end developers face particularly harsh conditions. I like to compare front end developers to the factory workers in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle": They just can't catch a break. There are tons of games and applications with ATROCIUS programming written in absolutely diobolical languages (like Java), but the are immensely popular due their interface (I'm looking at you, Minecraft and Pokemon). Who the heck jumps with out a reference to the origin? This goes to show that a good UI could literally make or break a project.