UI Frameworks, the Source Engine's Accelerated Back Hop of Web Design

Accelerated Back Hopping (ABH) is a speedrunning strategy in which a player turns around and performs backward hops (bunny hopping) to surpass the intended movement speed of Source engine games. This movement is slow and hard to master, but it has the potential to be the fastest form of transportation. Setting up a correct position, speed, and inputs for ABH could make or break a world record the fastest time for completing a video game.

The Speed Cap

It is very difficult to work in web development without learning UI frameworks when they are the industry standard. There are some people who program purely based on CSS and HTML, but a career in a FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) company is likely a far-fetched goal. Go on a framework’s website and you would see many logos of companies, often the top tech companies, that use the framework. UI frameworks have reached such a massive level of necessity, that big companies even publish their own UI and front-end tools, like Facebook’s publicly available React framework. Choosing to neglect a UI framework like Semantic UI could lead web developers to miss employment and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Forward Bunny Hopping

In an ever-changing industry of computer science, keeping up with industry standards is one of the most important factors for a successful career. The prevailing career path for aspiring computer science students is to work in the top tech companies, and arguably the most important factors are the understanding of their development tools. Collaboration is expected among the professional tech communities, and new employees are expected to work in the same environment, procedure, and pipeline as their team. Thus, keeping up with the current standard of development tools could give job applicants an advantage towards employment.

But Turning Backward

Even if the work environment allows for personal preferences, utilizing UI frameworks could contribute to the project’s success. For example, establishing a startup allows the creator to define their own workflow; the developer could choose to not use any frameworks at all. Even if the developer has more control over the development process, the project will benefit greatly from following the industry standard. Frameworks created and maintained by big companies offer greater functionality, for the company’s success likely depends upon the framework being beneficial towards the company in some way. In addition to that, if you want to replicate or reach the successes that big companies achieve with their project, trying to replicate their formula using their tools could yield some insights into their success.

And Launching Forward

Learning Semantic UI is quite a pain, in my opinion. I often found myself doubting the necessity of going through hours online tutorials, sometimes thinking “why would I need to go through all this work when I could have just used pure CSS?” The work towards leaning UI frameworks is tedious at first, but the usage of these frameworks in the software industry requires that you learn them. Even if UI frameworks are difficult and time-intensive, learning them provides a foundation for your future career and independent projects.