FrontenderZ is on a mission to help Frontend Developers in large software organizations by building Frontend Platforms that help reduce cognitive load, increase their Developer Experience (DX) and improve their productivity. When we talk about this, we notice not everyone understands what Frontend Platform engineering means, and why anyone would need it. so let's dive right into it!
Platform Engineering in general focuses on building and maintaining Internal Development Platforms (also called 'Digital Platforms') to streamline software development and deployment for developers. It's about creating self-service tools and environments that reduce cognitive load for Developers and improve their overall developer experience.
Not too long ago, the DevOps movement advocated for the motto "you build it, you run it", combining the previously separate areas of Development and Operations. It meant these fully autonomous DevOps teams were not only responsible for developing code, but also where and how it runs in production. They became owners of the entire process. As a consequence, you heard a lot about Developers having to become "T-shaped", meaning they had to develop skills beyond their Development specialty. They needed to know about Server Platforms their software needed to run on, how to build dashboards for monitoring their code in production, provision their own databases, and a whole lot of other responsibilities they didn't have before. Their technological landscape broadened dramatically.
All the while, all kinds of other concerns kept mounting as well. Not only the choices in variation of their own Tech Stacks kept increasing, the number of Legal, Compliance and Risk factors to keep into account became almost impossible to keep track of.
On top of all of that, all of these newly acquired DevOps tools and technologies kept evolving at a dramatic pace as well. This is what we refer to as the "Cognitive Load" developers have to deal with in their daily work.
To address this, organizations have been making the move towards Platform Thinking: take away the complexity that Developers these days have to deal with, by building a self-service product -a Platform- for internal Developers that abstracts away all of the underlying complexity, with built-in Compliance and Security - always up to date.
A very good definition of an Internal Development Platform comes from Evan Bottcher:
[...] a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product. Autonomous delivery teams can make use of the platform to deliver product features at a higher pace, with reduced co-ordination.
- Evan Bottcher
It's good to emphasize that the goal is still to have autonomous teams. They still own the full process: to build and to run the product. A Platform just makes it easier to live up to all of the responsibilities, because developers don't need to know all of the intricacies of the underlying infrastructure, and whatever Platform Components or Services they consume, they can be sure it adheres to all Compliance and Risk measures the company needs.
In order to build a great Internal Development Platform, you meticulously analyse the bottlenecks your developers deal with. Typically, you'll find that Infrastructure is the first thing to address. You want your developers to be able to say 'provide me a machine to run my new application in' and not having to think about compute size, scaling, redundancy, how and where it fits into the network and how to protect access to it. As you build out your Platform, you'll discover more and more areas where friction can be removed, where you can improve the Developer Experience, or add new and innovative ways to speed up development.
Now that we know what Platform Engineering in general means, what an Internal Development Platform is, and what the intentions behind Platform Thinking are, let's project that on the complexities Frontend Developers deal with in their daily work.
Before we dive into this, let's first establish that Frontend Development is a discipline with fundamental differences to Backend Development. Those differences lead to different workflows, architecture and requirements that need to be part of an Internal Development Platform.
The whole nature of the Frontend is that it runs on the client's hardware and operating system, over which you have no control. You can't just scale your application by throwing more hardware at it, or to break down a monolith into micro services, because it always runs on one client's device. Depending on your target audience, your client-side application may run on hardware that is 20 times slower than where you develop it on. Not only that, you also have no control over the device characteristics, capabilities, or even the runtime environment (OS/Browser/Webview combination).
Then, there's the inherent security issues that come with running interpreted (not compiled) code on a client device where the user is able to tinker with the source. Client-side persistence means storing readable data that can be modified, so never to be taken authoritative. To make matters worse, everything1 happens on a single thread. So if you think you can easily add some code to gather performance telemetry, this will happen on that very same thread and therefore degrade the performance you were trying to measure.
The Frontend Development ecosystem at large has become a hugely fragmented landscape of sub-ecosystems around Frameworks (such as Angular, React and Vue), Concepts (State management, Reactive programming) and another group proclaiming 'The Web is The Platform', and trying to leverage full-blown applications with just Web Standards and no frameworks. Everybody tries to solve issues Frontend Developers deal with, but in the process it's making the number of choices you make to build your Frontend Application almost unlimited.
You want to make sure the Digital Experiences your organization offers to its clients, are built upon a sustainable foundation of compatible frameworks, tools and concepts that are well maintained and can be arranged as one integrated, compelling Internal Frontend Development Platform.
If you want to speed up your Frontend Development, it's crucial that you limit the available options within your organization. You want to make sure the Digital Experiences your organization offers to its clients, are built upon a sustainable foundation of compatible frameworks, tools and concepts that are well maintained and can be arranged as one integrated, compelling Internal Frontend Development Platform.
In practice, you see many organizations starting their Frontend Platform activities by facilitating Frontend build pipelines. Frontend Continuous Integration pipelines are different from a pipeline for a Java-based microservice. You need different tools, different build agents and you have an entirely different way of running End to End tests, requiring client-side infrastructure to execute.
Deployments for apps using Client Side Rendering are usually relatively straightforward - the target is a simple nginx webserver or something similar. But what if you use Server Side Rendering or any of the 'in-between' rendering options? How do you leverage your company's infrastructure for building, testing and deploying a Frontend Application? These questions quickly draw Frontend Developers into areas they're less familiar with, or where they can't oversee the consequences of their choices beyond their own team. And that's where friction starts.
In some organizations you see Platform teams stepping up to help here. Together with for example a Frontend Chapter Lead they will be setting up some basic infrastructure to get Frontend applications from development to production.
And usually, that's where it stops...
But there are many other Frontend-specific frictions to be solved and there is much cognitive load to be reduced. Depending on where your Frontend Developers lose the most time, you can integrate many elements of a Frontend Platform into your Internal Development Platform.
[Update July 23, 2025: I've moved the seven topics mentioned in an earlier version into the Five Foundations of a Frontend Platform]
At FrontenderZ we've come to the Five Foundations of a Frontend Platform. These are five key aspects that we believe are key if you want to structurally reduce cognitive load for Frontend Developers, streamline their workflow and improve their Developer Experience.
You need to consider working on Pipelines and Test Infrastructure, Design System & Core Libraries, Dependency Management, Standardization & Best Practices and Observability and Logging. Each of them need a special consideration when it comes to Frontend Development.
Building a Frontend Platform is not an effort to be taken lightly if you want to do it right. The great thing about it is that -in most cases- you can take small steps and iterate quickly on what does and doesn't work. Whatever it is that causes your Frontend Developers the most stress, is usually the best place to start.
Is it keeping your dependencies up to date? Maybe start with centralized lifecycle management on a few important dependencies by having the migration done in a scripted way by the Platform team. Are your pipelines slow? Focus on creating a fast, standardized pipeline. It can be any of the above mentioned areas. What matters most, is that it should bring real, and immediate value to the teams joining your Platform.
It is however vital that your organization treats this as a topic that you need to assign permanent budget for. Building a Frontend Platform isn't a one-off. It isn't a side-job for Product teams. If you don't allocate permanent resources for this, you are set up for failure.
Also, don't try to start building one thing that works for your entire organization at once. Find the most Frontend-heavy area in your software development organization and see what they run into and start experimenting with a few teams. If it works for them, you can productize and scale the effort. More on that in later articles...
The growing complexity and cognitive load placed on Frontend Developers require a dedicated and strategic solution. While general Platform Engineering addresses broad DevOps challenges, a specialized Frontend Platform is essential for tackling the unique frictions inherent in Frontend Development.
From managing a fragmented ecosystem and complex build pipelines to ensuring design consistency and handling dependency updates. By creating a compelling internal product that offers curated frameworks, libraries and tools, a design system, centralized dependency management, and clear architectural guardrails, organizations can abstract away this complexity.
Treating the Frontend Platform as a permanent, evolving product is not merely a technical upgrade; it is a vital investment in Developer productivity, experience, and the long-term stability and velocity of your organization's Digital Experiences.
Notes
1. Yes, you can spin up Web Workers, or use Service Workers, but let's not get into that