Frontend vs Backend: Insights from Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and Founder of SpendNinja
In this episode, we talk to Jonathan Marvell, a technical consultant, US Army veteran, and founder of Spend Ninja, a fun and innovative personal finance app that helps you predict, manage, and optimise your cash flow.
We tackled some big questions, such as
1. Frontend vs Backend – What’s the Real Difference?
2. When Does a Monolithic Architecture Make More Sense Than Microservices?
3. What Are Some Common Mistakes Developers Make When Connecting Frontend to Backend?
4. Can You Explain InertiaJS to Someone Who’s Never Used It?
5. How Do You Decide Whether a Feature Belongs in the Frontend or Backend?
6. What’s Your Take on the Future of Frontend-Backend Interaction?
7. If You Could Give One Piece of Advice to Someone Learning Both Frontend and Backend, What Would It Be?
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00:00:01 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Hi, welcome to the Code Riot podcast by Millilux.io, In this episode, we'll talk to Jonathan Marvel, a technical consultant, U.S. Army veteran and founder of Spend Ninja, a fun and innovative personal finance app helps you predict, manage and optimise your cash flow. We've tackled some big questions such as real difference between front and back end.
00:00:20 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Monolithic architecture over microservices. The biggest mistakes developers make when connecting the two and inertia JS feature of front and back end interaction.
00:00:37 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Hey, Jonathan, mate, it's great to finally see you again and get you on the code right podcast. Thank you so much for giving up your time there. How's, how's it going in in sunny talent?
00:00:45 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
It's good. It's it's definitely not. It's not as warm as it is in, you know, in Florida, but that I'm used to. But you know, I'm making do it's sunny today, so we have to take the small winds.
00:00:51 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Mr.
00:00:57 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
100% yeah.
00:00:58 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
I was. I was like compared this compared to like last summer, I was like actually this is far more workable than it was last summer. I think it's pretty much like she Tyson like telling was glaciation pretty.
00:01:06 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Much just last year so.
00:01:08 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
I'm saying I'm I'm a.
00:01:10 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
It's a it's a small one.
00:01:11 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, and, but yeah, no, I'm just going to say thank you so much again for giving your time today. I realise you're so busy building your your company and obviously work on the side projects as well for for your clients. So can you give us a bit of a heads up of kind of what it is you do and what you're working on at the moment, just to kind of set the scene a little bit?
00:01:29 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I came to Thailand last May in 2024, and I, you know, from from Florida in the US and I, you know, in the states I've run a.
00:01:44 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Software engineering agency and we mainly focus on working with startups. We worked with a lot of startups over the last 10 to 15 years and and we've got to have kind of front row seats. So what they do good, what they don't do good, how they fail, how they.
00:01:57 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Succeed things like that so.
00:02:00 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, so I decided last year to to take the take the leap and and.
00:02:04 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Create my own startup and so that's kind of what I've done. And so that's why I I originally came to to Thailand is to create.
00:02:12 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Start up, so that's what I'm working on now is spin Ninja so.
00:02:12
Yeah.
00:02:14
Yeah.
00:02:16 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, fantastic. Well, we're definitely gonna feature complete show notes to to spending during. Obviously the agency in, in this. But yeah, thanks. Thanks for setting the scene a bit. I've I've I've kind of come from, like, a less technical background in terms of I came as a as a designer and then, you know, joined the military and and had my kind of my my decade in the military.
00:02:18
Yeah.
00:02:36 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
In various places and then came back to design in the future, but really interested in in tech now, especially kind of like where it integrates with kind of extended reality and augmented reality in the future. So what I want to do is just kind of get this get this kind of.
00:02:50 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
This this real basic kind of learner knowledge out there for other veterans, other service leavers, so that we could kind of understand how it all fits in together and how you can kind of build a career into like kind of software engineering development, their design, the you know the Excel stuff in the future. So without further ado, you want to kind of the first question is?
00:03:05
Yeah.
00:03:11 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
So, so so front end and back end like I've I've got a really basic understanding of kind of how these fit together in terms of obviously what the the front end is obviously thing that people see as you as the the name implies not to the back end is doing all the hard work the heavy.
00:03:25 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Lifting behind the scenes.
00:03:27 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Right.
00:03:28 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
But one thing I wanted to kind of ask you is like where does the line blur? What's what? What is front end and what is what constitutes the the back end I.
00:03:35 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Guess. Yeah. So yeah. I mean, I think that's.
00:03:36 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Tidy up.
00:03:42 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, if you if you wanna, you know, draw like a distinct line, it's definitely, you know, everything inside the the browser or if we're talking about web technologies, which is what I focus on that's going to be all your front end stuff mainly back end is going to be, yeah where you're you know you're you're running a lot of the logic.
00:04:02 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You can run some logic on the front end, but a lot of the logic is going to be running on the back end and it's going to be. That's where going to connect to your database or third party services. You know if you want to reach out and and you know if you're trying to connect to Stripe.
00:04:15 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
For you know, payments, you may do that from the back end and that's where the line gets a little blurry because you can do that from the front end as well with strike payments. Yeah, with stripe. So there are some, some things like that, but I think really when you think about back end development, you think about, you know API engineers and engineers who are just working in the back end.
00:04:23 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
I mean.
00:04:37 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
And then with the front end, you think more about the UI, the UX, you know there's there's tonnes on on both ends, you know with depending on which frameworks you use or which languages. And I mean there's, you know that's a whole.
00:04:49 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Saliu of of things, yeah, there's.
00:04:51
Yeah.
00:04:51 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Seems like every week there's another framework or language or something coming out so, but yeah, I would say, you know, in basic terms it's, you know, you're backing is going to pretty much has your logic in your front is is what the user is going to see is probably the most basic generalisation.
00:05:06 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:05:08 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, got it. And do you see that line kind of shift?
00:05:10 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Thing with I got to know like kind of AI machine learning. You know, kind of like newer languages that are coming out kind of, you know, the easier to understand is that is it are we seeing kind of more back end things migrating into front end or or vice versa or is that line kind of?
00:05:25 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Pretty much set in your.
00:05:26 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You're kind of.
00:05:27 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Seeing a lot of third party integrations with AI, especially to where they're using a front end like Nuxt JS or next JS react. You know view, you know may have heard of some of those, but and they're they're calling straight to these other services from from within those front end frameworks.
00:05:46 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So it is. It gets a little blurry there, but that is starting to happen more and more. You know where you don't need to set up an entire back end microservice anymore. You can really start to offload a lot of that to 3rd party services that didn't work as your back end for instance. We're using, you know off 0 for our authentication.
00:06:08 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
And so we don't you know that's all on non 0 servers we we do everything pretty much from the front end there. So feedback if there's been nothing crazy. So it definitely is getting a little bit more.
00:06:20 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
I guess it's it's requiring less if you're doing front end work, it's requiring less on the back end. If you're using a lot of third party services. And I know there's even low code that's really popular now, a lot of low code features, especially with AI with like cursor and bolt dot new and all these new systems that are coming out, they really make it easy for you to.
00:06:41 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Get involved and not have to write such the low level code that it just takes you forever to do something you're you're seeing now engineers put out, you know, an entire no code or low code system from AI within just a few weeks instead of three to five months or whatever for a prototype. So it's it's pretty amazing.
00:06:58 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Well, so I guess probably knock on effects from that is I.
00:07:00 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Mean there's probably.
00:07:00 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Gonna be pregnancy and more startups that start off fairly lean in terms of like a handful of people who are doing the front end stuff, but then maybe sending off the the kind of the third set the the the back ends of to third parties because it's now getting a lot kind of more streamlined. But by the sounds of it.
00:07:18 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Is.
00:07:18
Yeah. Yeah, because you've.
00:07:19 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Got yeah. And you've got some of the more traditional services like Firebase, Google Firebase. I think super base is another more comp. You know becoming more.
00:07:27 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Clear now, but same thing. You can do a lot of within their systems where you're not writing a bunch of back end API stuff. So you're really just focusing on making a good user experience creating a good, you know, UI and design for the user and you don't have to focus, you know, solely on creating all of the back end.
00:07:43 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Logic so there.
00:07:44 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Are a lot of services out there trying to make that?
00:07:46 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
A lot easier for users.
00:07:47 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Or for engineers I mean so. But yeah, I mean they're they're we're, you know, we're spending the same thing we're using.
00:07:49
Yeah.
00:07:56 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, we're kind of switching over to trying to use some more of those types of services versus the traditional route of creating all these microservices and authentication logic and all of that. So and database logic and stuff as well, so.
00:08:09 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Fascinating. Yeah. Incredible. What it does quickly, actually, to my next question. Seems we kind of mentioned it earlier is?
00:08:16 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Is that kind of? When does when does kind of monolithic architecture make more sense than those those micro services? I we've got everything in kind of one place versus you're going out to a number of different kind of third parties also.
00:08:31 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah. So the monolithic is really about your front end and back end being together, so and that.
00:08:37 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, with the case like larval that we've used a lot, which larval is great, especially if you're wanting to create like a SAS application.
00:08:45 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You can get started with like Laravel and I think Laravel Jet stream and and Laravel Nova and some of these other Laravel packages that are really well developed and you can really get a SaaS application up off the ground relatively quickly and it's all in one you know you're you're you're with the nurse at JS which is what larval is kind of.
00:09:05 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Hosting as their monolithic feature now you can you don't have to worry about making a separate API calls and stuff, you can just call straight to like the controllers and things like that. So with that it's.
00:09:19 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know that that's another one of those systems where there you do get a lot of the flexibility of having, it's not, it's not a low code system. You know you do have the flexibility of still having all the source code and everything, but if there's a lot of I guess templates or like pre written things for you packages and so that makes it real relatively easy, you can get you know connected to stripe.
00:09:39 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
And connected to billing and subscriptions and all that within just a few days. It's really, it's really pretty amazing and that's that's also a great tool to use for, for prototyping. If you're trying to get something out there real quick, it definitely makes more sense to to do something like that.
00:09:42 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, yeah.
00:09:54 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Then trying to build out, you know we've got 1 customer client that we work with right now that runs you know we've built 15 microservices for them and three different, three different UI's and two mobile apps. So they're very large client, but at the same time like that's not that's not where you want to start you know because if you start going down this road and start looking this up on the Internet, you're going to see all kinds of different architecture.
00:10:16 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Solutions and people are to say, do this and do this, but really you really want to do whatever is going to be fastest to get the product out. And so you know, if you come from the you know if you.
00:10:22
Yeah.
00:10:25 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
If you are just learning, you know engineering and you did learn, maybe you learned some PHP, then larva's going to be a good you know solution. If you've learned JavaScript only and maybe not so much that maybe use something like next or next JS because they kind of do a lot of the front end but they do have something called server side rendering and stuff where you can make some back end calls to these.
00:10:47 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Parties. So it's they're both very good use cases for each one of them. And then you know, obviously it just gets way more complex from there with Python And all the other when.
00:10:56 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
It was just they're out there so.
00:10:59 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
I mean that haven't gotten like, you know, going through the the lean set up a few times obviously like you described then the MVP getting that out as fast as possible to get that that kind of feedback from the you know from the the core or demographics that you're after. So yeah, I can definitely, definitely empathise with that, that approach of just gets, you know, build.
00:11:05 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yep.
00:11:12 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Right.
00:11:17 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Something get out there and start getting the feedback for you to iterate it. As you know to to a proper product and then obviously start firing on the back end stuff afterwards. But.
00:11:27 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah. No, it's it's. Yeah. Fascinating to hear it from from this because I only ever see the front end of.
00:11:32 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Things so.
00:11:33 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
It's right even looking at the, you know, the kind of the gloss finished version of it, and now it's actually it's far, far more interesting actually to understand like looking under the hood, so to speak and seeing what what's.
00:11:42 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
What how this?
00:11:42 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Stuff actually work, you know, rather than you know.
00:11:44 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah, yeah. You know, if if for your, you know, for the listeners that are just getting into the.
00:11:47
Yeah.
00:11:51 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
This field and stuff you will find out real quick that when you're showing it to people or you're trying to get like maybe a cofounder, maybe you're trying to get your friends or family to invest, you know, a little bit to get this going. You're.
00:12:00 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Going to.
00:12:01 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Find out they only care about the front end care that you wrote this, that OK that you spent weeks writing this very complex back end that does this really awesome thing. They just they don't. They just want to know what it looks like. That's it.
00:12:11 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
It's honest, it's.
00:12:13 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, I I like to do back end engineering way more than I like to do front end engineering. And so that's always the case. It's like we write this really awesome thing and then we send it off for the front end engineer to.
00:12:23 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
To you know, so that they can do their thing. And it's like, yeah, no one cares.
00:12:27 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
About us in the back end so.
00:12:29 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
They don't care how hard this was to actually do they. They just care that it works and it looks pretty on the front end.
00:12:35 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
That's all they want, yeah.
00:12:40 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:12:41 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Pretty common.
00:12:41 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Kind of like, yeah, this way you can think of like some military applications. There isn't. It's always the, you know, the people always more like the kind of front end that actually it's the the back end of things that you know and logistics if we keep everything running properly, doesn't it where you intend without a back end.
00:12:55 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah.
00:12:57 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah. Great. Great. That's all there. But in kind of like getting on to the next question like what are some of the the common mistakes kind of developers make when connecting the front end to the back end, you know is it, is it making sure it's obviously robust to connections between the two and not not kind of like doing too many too many queries?
00:13:17 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
2 little queries you know, get out. Get out.
00:13:18
So I don't.
00:13:20
Right.
00:13:20 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
I don't really think that's the. I don't. You're not going to see that a lot. I don't think, especially if you use something like lauraville, it's going. That's a whole framework that kind of is going to have some rules set in place for those things, but also even with, you know, next and stuff that's a little bit more flexible, what you're really going to see is you're going to see people.
00:13:40 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Like these really complex, you know, solutions when when they're and they're writing it to scale and they don't even have customers. That's what I see more than anything where it's and it's really it's over optimization, right is what they're trying to do. They're trying to optimise for.
00:13:58 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know 100,200 thousand transactions per minute or per second when you don't even have two transactions per minute right now. Yeah, you don't have two transactions a day. So I think that is probably the biggest thing I see with startups and other and and other engineers I've worked with before is.
00:14:18 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
They'll they'll really want to, you know.
00:14:20 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Or they'll want to.
00:14:21 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Do all the edge cases.
00:14:22 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Right. So if you're not familiar with age cases, just like someone will someone 1 user may run into this problem essentially. And so the the thing about edge cases is like, especially when you're doing a proof of concept like 8020 rule like do 80% of what 80% of people going to run into. You know we had an edge case recently that you know was going to take.
00:14:42 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Like it was going to take like a month to implement the fix for it and we realised it was like less than 1% of our users will ever see this edge case and we could we could just fix it manually with the with the help support ticket for now. So I think you really that is the I mean I can't stress that enough. I see people just make these super complex systems.
00:14:54 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:15:02 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
And instead of just getting the very basic stuff right and then you know, I've also seen where they've made this one complex really complex piece, but then there's these core features that they need and maybe one of the core features doesn't work with the technology stack or technology they're using. So now they just spend all this time doing this and they can't solve this other more.
00:15:20 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Common or more easy?
00:15:21 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Solution because they're now tied into this more complex solution, so I see that as well. I mean, you know, there are some, you know, I would say if you think you're going to be building and you do have a.
00:15:32 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Audience, you know, Laravel is definitely great for some of that stuff. They've got larval queues built in and so with the queues, you know you can.
00:15:41 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Kind of push stuff.
00:15:42 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
To a queue and let it process in the database in the back end, stuff at it as it as it's needed. We were able to, you know, with the with a very basic system. I think we're able we were able to do about.
00:15:53 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Half a million transactions per hour. That's with no optimization or nothing right out.
00:15:58 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Of the box.
00:16:01 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
For one of our clients, so you know, I think if you don't have a huge background in like like if you didn't come from this like cyber or sorry computer science world, maybe you just went to a boot camp then definitely sticking to something like Laravel or sticking to something like next or next is going to make a lot more sense.
00:16:21 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Then trying to run everything you know from scratch as well, because once again, people want to write and rust or whatever because they think oh low latency and it's like you don't, you don't, you don't need you. You're not even at a low latency point right now. You probably don't need this.
00:16:33
Yeah.
00:16:33 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So you know there are use cases for those things and there are people out there who already have an audience. And so they know when they launch, they're going to have, you know, 100,000 users in the first month. And right, that's a different story. But when you don't have any users on a wait list and you have no audience and you don't know who is going to use this, definitely, you know, stick to the basics and build the most common common stuff and the easiest stuff. And you can.
00:16:53 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Later.
00:16:54 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, got it.
00:16:56 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Got a fascinating time. I'm doing times for that. This is, yeah. In terms of like, you know, getting my I'm heading in this space for kind of like.
00:17:04 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
When we put.
00:17:05 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
XR in the feature and I guess kind of in a question, we could have spoke about previously is.
00:17:06 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah.
00:17:14 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
And kind of understanding kind of like inertia JS now I I obviously come for the background. Why can I use like Vanilla JS so.
00:17:20 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
To speak.
00:17:21 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah, yeah.
00:17:21 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
And then obviously now we it's it's like pulling back that curtain and all of a sudden you're just like, you know, it's not just vanilla JS, there's so.
00:17:28 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Different Java scripts out there and and you're kind of trying to understand then, right, what's the important one? What's the one that Evans like using for different for different needs and and yeah, and we were kind of speaking offline about kind of highlighting it in Azure JS. So I kind of understand it does make back end and front end integration a lot smoother.
00:17:38 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yep.
00:17:48 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yes.
00:17:49 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
How? How does that work in in practise from themselves?
00:17:51 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So I think I think you know.
00:17:54 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
With, you know you mentioned just it kind of got me thinking here, when you're talking about.
00:18:00 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Wanting to what you what you're going to choose, you know, because you said Vanilla JS. There's so many different ones. You always want to make sure whichever 1 you do go with, no matter which one it is, that there is a good audience for it. There is a good user base so you can easily get help online. That's another thing. Use some obscure or one that's not been out for, you know, maybe a year or two. You may not have very many users.
00:18:20 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Engineers using it and so it's going to be very hard to get support or get any help or find any help online.
00:18:25 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So you know with with inertia JS for instance, it is a little newer, but it is built into the larval ecosystem. You can also use live wire with larval as well, but yeah, it pretty much what it does is it keeps it all in one code base, so you're not running, you're not running a front end code base and a back end code base and then trying to get them to talk to each other and dealing with cores which is a nightmare.
00:18:46 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know what you what it is. Is. Yeah, you're. You can essentially make the inertia J.
00:18:50 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know calls straight to. You know it uses the larger router and so it makes routing and stuff easy. It really is. It really is a nice solution for someone just getting started into and they want to get their hands dirty in both front end and back end. Then you're going to be able to, you know, write the models and the controllers within Marvel, and then you're going to write the views.
00:19:10 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Within JavaScript. So I think that you know, personally I like that one where you know we do a lot of our stuff in larval.
00:19:19 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
But we also do nuts 3, so I do, but I so I do like both of them. They're both very similar. Inertia does use U templates as well, so if you're using the ujs then you know if you're familiar with ujs, then inertia is going to be easy for you to.
00:19:32 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Understand and use.
00:19:34 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Next three obviously uses. It's a. It's a view framework, so it uses view templates.
00:19:38 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
As well, but it definitely it will help keep things more organised so that is a big thing too. If you're not familiar with how to organise your code and you're you're new at it at this, then it is going to. It is going to kind of have a little bit more rigid set of rules so it's easier for you to kind of pick up on when you're when someone's like oh create this you know on on a form on you know stack overflow or whatever it's like create this controller.
00:20:00 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Well, now you know where that is. You know where that's in the controllers folder and where that folder is versus having you figure it out all on your own. So. But yeah, a nurse should definitely. It's definitely they're doing a lot with.
00:20:07 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
And.
00:20:12 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, we started using it on a recent project and was I was pretty impressed with it because we're coming from the, you know, writing these big projects where we're used to having the front end separate. But I will say they've, they've definitely done a good job at at integrating that and making it easy. So that is the, you know, securing your front end and your back end the the communication between the two, if you create them.
00:20:31 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
I'm really, you know, that's not. That's another, you know, hassle. That's another thing you have to worry about and nuts kind of makes that. Sorry inertia kind of makes that a little easier and a little more pain free for, especially for people start.
00:20:42
Gary.
00:20:43 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah.
00:20:44 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah. And obviously you're you're planning to build your, you know the product or the web app that you're gonna like talking about. And obviously like the, the ability for the front end to talk to the back end is on this you need to.
00:20:52
Mm-hmm.
00:20:53 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Think.
00:20:53 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
About before you even approach, you know kind of like doing that build, isn't it? Because obviously could be a problem which will then stuck with afterwards and and costly and time resources.
00:21:01 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yes.
00:21:04 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
You know everything I guess is, would you say it's something that probably people kind of forget or or they kind of like do they tend to?
00:21:04
Yep.
00:21:10 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
The you know, forget about the communication between the front end and the back.
00:21:15 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
End.
00:21:15 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
No, definitely not. Not experienced engineers, but definitely if you've if you've never done something like that before and you're just, you know, maybe you're coming. Like I said, from a boot camp where a lot of boot camps.
00:21:16 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Early on was that.
00:21:27 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
They're going to teach you just. I know. I know. I've. I've hired some people from boot camp. So I'm speaking from experience with working with these kind of engineers who come from this. They don't, they don't have a degree and they haven't spent the last four or five years you.
00:21:41 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
As a hobby, being an engineer, so they're very new then typically I know a lot of the boot camps even start you out with some starter stuff, so they usually don't see that they usually only focus primarily on front end. To be honest from what?
00:21:53 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
I've seen so.
00:21:55 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
But, but The thing is, yeah, so if you're a brand new engineer and you're straight out of boot camp and you're thinking, OK, I'm going to write this system, I'm going to create this API and all that, and then you find out, oh, this isn't, you know.
00:22:04 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Connecting. It's going to be a lot more difficult to make sure the connections are secure and then what kind of security you're going to use and you know.
00:22:11 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Are you going to make sure your everything stays encrypted and nothing is leaking and and all that stuff? So it definitely can get really complex and it's definitely something that, you know, unless you have a need for it. Like I said, I highly recommend either using Laravel or you know using either next JS or NUTS, JS and possibly with like.
00:22:31 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
The Google firebase.
00:22:34 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Back end because they they have a a package that will manage that for you. But you know if it's your first time, I probably wouldn't recommend trying to write a separate 2 separate systems just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you're a single engineer too. I mean we, you know, we have about what we have 10 engineers on my team. So you know that.
00:22:45
Yeah.
00:22:54 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
That that we deal with this. So we're not all just one person trying to write the front end and the back end and all that.
00:22:59 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So you know, whereas if you use something like Laravel or nuts or something, there's definitely a lot of commands you can run that will set up a lot of the features for you to right out of the gate to get started. And I think that's the most important thing when you're getting started is to just get started. You could spend days or weeks trying to plan out the perfect solution. Just get started and figure it out.
00:23:19 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Like I I'm I'm in the same kind of mindset in in terms of like you know build it and figure out on the hoof as well, you know or or at least you know try it and then you you either learn how to do it better or you'll figure it out on the.
00:23:31 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Exactly.
00:23:31 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
You know, unless it's something like, you know, enormous for, for example. But yeah, I'm the the same kind of does that design thinking actually is is really quite powerful when it comes to when you come from kind of traditional project management.
00:23:41 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Background, yeah.
00:23:43 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, it's quite, quite, quite refreshing to hear it, so.
00:23:47 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
OK, so it does get on to my next question then. So so you're building a new feature like what factors would help you determine if it belongs in the front end or the back end? I mean, I guess I guess it it depends on the complexity of obviously the, the, the feet.
00:24:03 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, but I mean is is like another clear kind of like thing. It says right, this is this is definitely front end. This is definitely back end or is it kind of.
00:24:10 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So, I mean, it's usually pretty cut and dry. You know, you're not going to typically you're not going to do a database insert from the from the front end. Now you may do it from a front end framework like NUXT, using SSR and and drizzle CRM or something like that.
00:24:11 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Complete.
00:24:28 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
But you're not. Yeah. You're not going to access because anything on the front end like that. Any of the not any. But those a lot of those variables, if you don't use Sr friends can be accessed on the anywhere you know. So that that's a security risk. But but there are some I guess it's really you know most of your logic's going to be on the back end.
00:24:43
Yeah.
00:24:48 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
I will say.
00:24:49 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
That.
00:24:50 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know where it kind of gets a little tricky is because you can do some stuff on the front end, right? You know, you can do calculations and things like.
00:24:57 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
That and so sometimes that's.
00:24:59 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Where it depends on the use case, so you know first it's. If you are, let's take a shopping cart for.
00:25:06 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Instance.
00:25:07 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:25:07 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
And you know, so you get to the checkout right from the shopping cart and it calculates your total.
00:25:13 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You can either you know you could do that on the front end, technically so you could take all the items that are in the cart currently and then add them all together and get the total. The other thing you could do is have a API call that goes to your back end that just returns all of those products plus the total and everything already done.
00:25:34 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So it just depends on what the use case is. But I mean that's a good example of something that you can do on both the front end and back end. It just depends on how you want to do it. You know, you definitely don't want to. You definitely want to be mindful that when you are doing things like that, especially on the front end because those resources a lot of times.
00:25:54 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Will be running on the user's computer.
00:25:56 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So you know, if you do a lot of logic on using front end especially you know in, in actually in the front end not not like an SSR server but then what's going to happen is you know that your website is going to appear slow to different people because it's based on the hardware that's on their computer versus if you do that on the back end and.
00:26:16 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
And you know.
00:26:17 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
What? What we would, what I would recommend in that situation is which is what we do is we.
00:26:23 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
We'd actually do a.
00:26:24 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Back end call.
00:26:26 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
To the shopping cart, get everything totaled up and everything right? And then what happens is every time they go to the shopping cart from then on out, we've set a cash file, so it's cashed. So unless something changes, if it changes, then we break that cash file and we get it. But we don't go back to the API.
00:26:42 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Every time which also you know helps. So that's a little bit stuff you can do on the front end to make.
00:26:46 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Things easier. And so we just send a cash response from the back end from then on out and then you know then you don't have to worry about trying to load 10 products in and all this stuff from your, from your APIs, so.
00:26:59 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:27:00 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
It is usually pretty cut and.
00:27:01 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Dry, though, as far as what belongs on the front end, what belongs on the back end. But I mean it is the Internet.
00:27:06 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So I've seen it all. So yeah, that's good.
00:27:07
Yeah.
00:27:11 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
I guess they come see obviously like this.
00:27:14 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
It it's people have been using it for like a long time now and some so that e-commerce kind of example you use there is it's really gone through that whole kind of feedback loops of iteration in terms of you know people have managed people will probably were caching it on on users computers in the in the early days and obviously as their Internet kind of usage grew.
00:27:19
Yeah.
00:27:34 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
And people were doing e-commerce from all parts of the world. I guess that probably just became unworkable after that. And and like you say.
00:27:42 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah. I mean, I think that's where a lot of the JavaScript frameworks came from was, you know, you know back, you know, 1520 years ago, you know, you were there was all being rendered on the server and then and then JavaScript was kind of helping to manipulate the some of the front end stuff. And so I think to kind of optimise that and enhance the features. You know that.
00:28:01 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
That has kind of helped.
00:28:04 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
But yeah, I mean, you know that's you can still render everything on a back end server and you can still you know you don't have to use a lot of front end tech. But I think it does make sense to you know just kind of figure out what the feature is.
00:28:16 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Going to be and.
00:28:17 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
How well, how much load is it going to be if you're maybe calculating and it's always just going to be between two things.
00:28:25 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Then maybe you do that on the front end just because you know, maybe you don't need to call back to the server every time. But if you are, you know if if it's an array of things and it could be anywhere from 2 to 100 and you never.
00:28:37 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Know what the?
00:28:38 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
User then it might make sense to do that like like I the example I've given where you make a back end call.
00:28:44 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
To the server and then like I said, if you want to speed that up, you can cache the result that way it you know it doesn't, it doesn't slow down every time because what front end you know development, you know you have to worry about that too is you want the user experience to be really good. So you want it to be fast. You don't want to Click to your car and then it takes four or five seconds to load. You know you want it to load in 2 1/2.
00:29:04 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Seconds or whatever.
00:29:05 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:29:06 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:29:07 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know and and and Peach. Peach Time is a big thing, especially with front end technology because yeah, Amazon a a few, many years ago did a study and I think they slowed their website down. Don't quote me on this but it was something like they only slowed it down by like you know half a second so 500 milliseconds and it would end up being something crazy like I don't know.
00:29:07
Yeah.
00:29:27 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Thousands of dollars per day in loss just because of that slowdown? Yeah, because users didn't stick around like so. That's the other thing too. So you definitely want to be careful not to run too much logic on on your front end.
00:29:31
Yes.
00:29:39 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So that you don't mess with that and if you are, you know just then tell the user what you're doing. Hey, we're calculating this or make it fun and animated, you know, but definitely, definitely don't want to to overload. I've seen it done. I've seen tonnes of front end logic. And I'm like, why are we? Why is this being done? Like it makes 4 different API calls, get them all and then calculates it on the front end.
00:29:59 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
I was like what?
00:29:59 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Why are we doing this?
00:30:01 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
So I have seen this done, but it's never good. Never good practise.
00:30:03
Yeah.
00:30:05
Yes.
00:30:06 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
100 and also from like a Google SA perspective as well as Google, Google doesn't like it if you're if you're, you know if you got such slow page loading times and Googles like right let's go down to the next you know, serve up the next hit rate because we don't want we don't want the reputational damage that comes with a slow loading website to hit to hit them.
00:30:11 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Right.
00:30:24 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Exactly.
00:30:26 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
When it comes to seven of those results as well, isn't it so? Yeah, I guess kind of like, you know, speed, speed these days is is, is king, isn't it? Because it's. Yeah, it's all about, like that kind of just in time. But making sure that people are getting exactly what they want when they want without having that that excess excess wait time.
00:30:34 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yes.
00:30:42 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Right. Yeah. No, that's definitely yeah. Speed is king these days. I mean, you know, everybody wants everything instantly. It's like, no, it's not like we need this to be way faster. So, I mean, there's, you know, but once again, that's, you know, one of those people can get.
00:30:50 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Thank you.
00:31:02 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Just on that as well on speed and optimise and optimise and optimise like you don't have any users, don't worry.
00:31:07 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
About it right now.
00:31:09 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Just get some users.
00:31:12 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, like you can, you can work on like, don't you know, obviously don't want like a 45 second load time or something insane but like.
00:31:17 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah, if you if you a little bit off, OK, not a big deal. Figure it out later, you know.
00:31:21 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah, yeah. You must have something valuable that some people are coming there for or or, you know, or perching because people are willing to kind of wait for that time. It's like you got lots of competitors who are able to offer exactly the same thing. Exactly the same value with that. And then you're just that the key, the key variable there being speed. And that's kind of why you're ending up at the bottom. It's just you haven't got the people coming there in the first place.
00:31:26 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Yeah.
00:31:41 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
To to wasn't about speed.
00:31:42 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Right, exactly. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, cause that's once again you can over, you know, over optimised to to try to deal with things that aren't problems right now.
00:31:53 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah. Yeah, great advice. Yeah.
00:31:55 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Well, I mean, as you're you're so busy today, so I'll jump onto the the final question. That's OK. Yeah. And kind of what, what one piece of advice would you give to somebody learning kind of both the front end and the back end, I guess going for that full stack kind of like knowledge you know from from the start?
00:31:59
Yes.
00:32:12 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
I would say, you know, if you are, I think it depends on what your end goal is, right? If you are trying to build you know you maybe you want to become a an engineer or developer because you just want to build your own. You have an idea for an app and you want to build it yourself, right?
00:32:28 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
That's a different mindset than if you're trying to get a job. If you're trying to get a career somewhere, you know I wouldn't recommend trying to do, I guess in some startups, yes, but mainly if you're trying to get a career, you really want to focus front end door, back end, not full stack, you really want to be good at one first before you try to be good at the other, like and there are use cases and.
00:32:48 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Especially like if you're going to start a startup or something like that, then yeah, you're going to need to know both. I would definitely recommend.
00:32:57 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
If you're not going to do a boot camp, then I would definitely recommend you know finding some tutorials that are within you know, a year old from on YouTube or go to, you know all the resource. I use a lot is udemyudemy.com you can. Yeah, you can buy courses on there pretty cheap, especially they're always on. They're always.
00:33:10 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah.
00:33:14 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Like it's $200, it's $14.00.
00:33:17 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Today, so just add it to your cart and wait. But I think you know, because they're they're really good. What I the what I like about you. Demi is typically the the.
00:33:28 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
The instructors will tell you what the tech stack is, so you do have to worry about that, I guess too, as a new engineers like you might, it may just say nuxt and then you realise it's nuts too. Halfway through it like my stuff's not working. So yeah, you're you're on the wrong version of nuts. But they didn't tell you that they are getting better at that. But that does happen. So you don't know all the time. But I would say, yeah, if you're getting started in this.
00:33:48 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Uh.
00:33:50 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
You know, if you're going to, if you're definitely trying to learn, you know, on your own and just build your own startup and a SaaS application especially then obviously Laravel is going to be a good, you know, there's a lot of great tutorials out there, it's easy to deploy as well. So that's the other thing. Once you built this, you have to get on the Internet, how do you deploy this thing? Laura will makes that easy for you to do it and not have to worry about it too much if you're going to.
00:34:07
Yes.
00:34:11 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
That's her next route. Then you know, Versaille hosting makes it easy to deploy as well.
00:34:15 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
But I think that's those are some of the things to think about, like, oh, you know, when you're first starting out, think about the entire picture, make sure you can at least check the mating boxes. Whether can I build this? Do I know how to do it? Does the technology exist? And, you know, can I deploy it and get it on the Internet? And how easy are those things? And I think definitely in the beginning I would recommend.
00:34:35 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Also, really, you know you may use services that right now maybe you don't scale real well like you know versaille can get very expensive. So maybe that's not a host I'm going to, you know be using in a year. But for my initial versaille can you can get online in a day essentially so it's.
00:34:50 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Like you know, also don't worry about that too much right now. Just worry about getting, you know, getting users that should be your biggest thing, I think.
00:35:00
Yeah.
00:35:01 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
A great place to.
00:35:04 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today and yeah.
00:35:05 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
Grace, yeah.
00:35:08 Jonathan Marvell, US Army veteran, Technical Consultant and founder of Spend Ninja
No, I appreciate you having me.
00:35:11 Chris Shirley, Website Developer, Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Designer at Hiatus.Design (https://www.hiatus.design), website design and brand studio
It was really great chatting with Jonathan at deep diving on the complexities of software development. If you want to find out more about anything we covered, check out the segments below and we'll see you next time.
