When people hear “frontend,” their minds often jump to buttons, transitions, sprinkle-of-glitter CSS, and the occasional confetti explosion. 🎉 It’s the part of development that feels tangible — clickable, animated, good looking.
But if you’ve ever built something more demanding than a landing page, you know that what users see is only a fraction of the story.
Let’s take a quick trip under the hood of Transaction Inspector — a real-world frontend project where looks alone weren’t enough — and talk about the architectural lessons that made it actually performant. 🧮⚡
When Good Looks Aren’t Enough 😅
At first, my goal was simple: make Transaction Inspector look great. Clean UI, great UX — the kind of app that makes users think "this app is great and simple to use". But also? It needed to handle hundreds or thousands of blockchain transactions without collapsing like a laptop running Chrome with 72 tabs. 🔥💻
Design mattered — but architecture was mission-critical.
The Golden Rule: Flow First 🧬
One of the first (and best) decisions I made was to build a class-based service layer to handle the heavy lifting. Why?
Because great performance starts with how data flows through your app. 🛣️
A few key choices:
- Wax is loaded and extended once, globally — no more repetitive imports or sluggish reinitializations.
- Business logic is off the UI's plate and safely tucked away. No rogue side effects, no spaghetti components code.
- Components? Free to focus purely on data visualization. No backend juggling acts here.
The result?
- ⚡ Snappier execution
- 🧪 Easier testing
- 🔧 Cleaner, more maintainable code
And most importantly — a frontend that doesn’t freeze when real data rolls in. 🍝🚫
Scaling Without Screaming 📈🧘♂️
If you don’t architect with scale in mind, things might seem fine… until your app meets its first real dataset. 😬
Laggy popups, frozen tables, and “why is this taking so long?” moments? We've all been there. But it doesn't have to be that way.
This approach isn’t just “Frontend best practices” — it’s about:
- Real separation of concerns
- Thoughtful dependency management
- A clear, intentional data lifecycle
In short, UX that stays buttery smooth — even under load. 🧈✨
TL;DR — Good Frontend = Smart Backend in Disguise 🤓
Here’s the one thing I’ve learned that I wish I knew earlier:
A great frontend isn’t just about painting pixels — it’s about thinking like a backend dev, even in JavaScript-land.
When your app grows, it's, not the animations, that keeps everything running. If your app looks fast and is fast - that’s not luck - that’s architecture. 🧙♂️✨
Stay tuned, Hive! 🐝🚀