Side Project

1 sameish as you, I’m not good at coming up with good UI on my own even though I know what good looks like. 2 is I always start/stop projects, so when I pick something back up I spend a ton of time remembering where I was

Personally my limit is choice paralysis. I have noticed I am not really able to build anything for myself but can cobble together something real fast and expand on concept when given a feint idea. So I guess my limit is more conceptual and not technical as I do build from backend to front. Oh and forms I hate forms.

backender with a front-end headache, that's relatable.

focusing on functionality over design is common, but yeah, looks matter too, especially when sharing your work.

i've seen folks partner with a designer or dive into some basic design principles themselves.

it's about finding that balance between function and form. anyone else face this? how'd you get better at the parts outside your main skill set?

I'm primarily backend focused as well. I've dabbled with Vue and other large JS frameworks which I've hated. But what I ultimately chose to use for frontend is HTMX https://htmx.org/ which allows me to focus on the backend and render and serve HTML easily. To gain little flourishes, I've paired it up with Alpine JS https://alpinejs.dev/ or just plain ole JS.

The theme was for the frontend I wanted things that provided a lot of power and usability without a lot of distraction, i.e. these solutions each have one page of reference material for their handful of directives, I choose what I need, implement it, and I get back to the backend.

Design wise, I like tailwind but that's fairly opinionated. I tend to like design so I can usually whip up something fairly quick in tailwind. For more structured solutions, component frameworks like bootstrap provide a lot of value, but hard to customize.

Hope this helps.

Im in the same exact boat. Im a backend guy, i whip up the API and datastorage stuff real easy but then i smack my head against the desk for weeks to get a dated af looking UI slapped together. I recently found the Mantine UI react component library tho and im liking it.