{"id":95,"date":"2022-09-13T14:17:28","date_gmt":"2022-09-13T14:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kholterhoff\/?p=95"},"modified":"2023-02-07T16:11:42","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T16:11:42","slug":"a-redmonk-conversation-the-dynamic-frontend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kholterhoff\/2022\/09\/13\/a-redmonk-conversation-the-dynamic-frontend\/","title":{"rendered":"A RedMonk Conversation: The Dynamic Frontend"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It was my great privilege to speak with Stephane Rodet<\/a>, UX Engineering Manager at IBM<\/a> on the subject of Frontend engineering, design and user experience this summer for a video in our A RedMonk Conversation<\/a> series. IBM has been doing some exciting work in this space, and you don\u2019t have to take our word for it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My conversation with Rodet<\/a> casts IBM’s innovation-minded approach in stark relief as we cover a range of topics on the subject, beginning with a discussion of how he became interested in design after starting as a mainframe engineer:<\/p>\n

so I started funnily as a backend developer on the mainframe. So I was actually building a component that managed the processing capacity and so on dynamically on the mainframe. So it was a very cool, super interesting topic. Far, far from the frontend, actually, but we had a desktop app that actually managed the software. And so I was assigned as the first assignment to actually test this desktop app. And so I opened so many tickets that for the next iteration, they put me on the frontend team and they were like, Stephane, no, you\u2019re going to help fix this. And so we quickly moved to actually one of the first Web apps for the same management. So it was it was a new initiative that became the so called z\/OS MF<\/a>. So z\/OS management facility was one of the first management system for the mainframe as a web app. So we were working with a very early, clunky kind of JavaScript tooling. So it was really interesting to see how it was installed.<\/p>\n

And so after that I got asked to come on to one of the initial and first private cloud teams at IBM, and we\u2019re working on the on the initial private cloud products around 2009. And so I got asked to help for the frontend. And so then we moved to bit we were then using Dojo<\/a> for producing our app and this led me to become more and more interested in the UX topic. And actually at your conference, at the Monkigras conference, I listened to Phil Gilbert (Monki Gras 2014: Phil Gilbert on Recreating A Design Culture at Scale<\/a>) explaining IBM design, and I also heard a lot about it internally. And what happened in parallel is that I started to meet the design community in my location. And we started building bonds and meeting regularly, and at some point one of the guys in the team got up and I came to the idea \u201cWhat if we start our own studio?\u201d And so this was how we started the story of a design at IBM Boeblingen<\/a> (IBM R&D Germany).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We then spend some time clarifying professional terms by hashing out what differentiates the UX Engineer from Design Developers, Creative Developers, and Prototypers. Although Rodet jokes about there being, \u201cso many names for a similar role,\u201d he clarifies that significant differences separate them:<\/p>\n