I love writing back-end and client JS code, but I hate the front end HTLM/CSS

I’ve written lots of JavaScript, Python and even some Java code to run web applications. Well, let me clarify, a little over ~20k lines of…

I’ve written lots of JavaScript, Python and even some Java code to run web applications. Well, let me clarify, a little over ~20k lines of a mixture of server-side and client-side code. I have no problem writing code that accesses a database to select, update, delete, and insert. I have no problem with writing code that uses CRUD. I don’t even mind writing client side JS to update a display, get data for a front-end developer, and writing a small SDK for them to interface with for accessing data… but I can’t stand writing HTML/CSS.

I’ve been writing a CMS platform because I wanted to learn how the software worked. This isn’t my first web application, I wrote one before in Python; not to say I’m a professional at writing this software. A headless CMS, to be specific. I have an API written for NodeJS and an SQLite3 database backend; however, I wrote it so that I could swap the backend out and as long as I wrote the right interfaces it will still work — it’s modular.

My CMS API can do user management by creating, updating, and deleting user accounts. Article management by creating, updating, and deleting articles. There’s an alerts API for managing site wide alerts. Status management for creating, updating, and deleting status updates, think of something like Facebook posts. The API can do a lot of other things, but that’s what I spent most of my time working on.

I have an API that can do a bunch of CMS related things; however, the front-end I have is basic, doesn’t take advantage of all the features of my API, is badly written in HTML, CSS, and some JS because I threw a lot of it together. The front-end is built using Jekyll, because I don’t want to write HTML code over and over. The front-end is also developed at a MUCH slower rate, because I get excited writing the back-end and not the front-end.

The back-end is opensource and available publicly on GitHub, as well as the front-end :-(.

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