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Sam Newman
Personal blog · samnewman.io/blogprogrammingcareer
Sam Newman's personal blog at samnewman.io covers programming and career. Since 2015, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “Pattern: Backends For Frontends (BFF)”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sam Newman's site mostly for its Backends for Frontends (BFF) pattern page and his microservices books. Commenters point to it as the fuller treatment of the pattern.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Book called great; suggested for learning cloud tech; BFF article said to go into greater depth than another.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Pattern: Backends For Frontends (BFF)13 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2019-01-10
- Pattern: Back ends for front ends7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-11-24
- Don't Call It a Platform5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-02-09
- /books/building_microservices/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-24
- Microservices for Greenfield?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-07
- /books/building_microservices_2nd_edition/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-04
What Hacker News says?
The client pays it. - If the server is responding with JSON, the client has to parse, decode, and validate the JSON. Then it has to transform it into HTML DOM nodes. Finally, it can inject them into the DOM. - If the server is responding with a bespoke non-JSON data structure, it's the same situation as above except even more work because a third-party, non-standard library has to decode this structure into somethin…
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “Htmx 4.0”Submitted Want to spell check? Read the fine print as a story · 248 points
HN discussionI was just reading the other day this article about the Backend for Frontend pattern (BFF) which suggests the best way to avoid tight coupling is for services you don't want tightly coupled to be owned by different teams, and to allow reasonable duplication of functionality between them. Everybody knows how hard it is to get another team to implement functionality for you. This is where I got the BFF pattern from: h…
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “The End of Microservices”Submitted Pattern: Back ends for front ends as a story · 53 points
HN discussionhttps://samnewman.io/books/building_microservices/
Comment linking /books/building_microservices/
on “Sample cloud-native application with microservices”Submitted Microservices for Greenfield? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “The modern web on a slow connection (2017)”Submitted Pattern: Backends For Frontends (BFF) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI would say Backend For Frontend solves the same problems for most people, and the tooling around REST is available everywhere. http://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/ We have data repositories living behind very simple REST controllers, an endpoint probably doesn't take that much longer to write than a GraphQL query.
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “The GraphQL stack: How everything fits together”Submitted The Case Against Certification as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe BFF pattern[1] may be more useful today to many, due to various types and sizes of devices and different sorts of integrations. MVC can be used in its place, but it would often introduce unnecessary complexity, e.g. additional controllers. MVC works for contextually equivalent interaction, which is still very useful, too. Mostly just do what makes sense. The challenge is, as it has been, how to be flexible, smar…
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “Vue Native (2018)”Submitted Pattern: Back ends For Front end (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI appreciate you calling me out on my wording, because you are spot on. If anything GraphQL “bleeds” even more into my front-end code. I think the appropriate way to frame it is that GQL is a more targeted, holistic solution to the problem of fan-out data aggregation from the perspective of a UI client. Every UI codebase I had that depended on protos had significant chunks of code transforming the data more appropri…
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “The state of gRPC in the browser”Submitted Pattern: Back Ends for Front Ends as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOut of all the API implementations I've created in my career I've had the most success implementing BFF (Backends for Frontends) with simple RPC'ish endpoints. Everything else never quite fit right and wasted so many hours. https://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better”Submitted Don't call it a platform: Down with The Platform, up with Developer Enablement as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI believe the author is referring to using node.js for the backend part in the backend for frontend pattern => http://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “JavaScript is Eating the World”Submitted Don't Call It a Platform as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSam Newman's The Magpie Talkshow http://samnewman.io/podcast/
Comment linking /podcast/
on “Ask HN: What coding/programming podcasts are you listening to?”Submitted Microservices for Greenfield? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBackends for Frontends. An alternative to making "one API to rule them all". Far less time spent trying to model an API in an abstract way that makes sense to many consumers. Instead, an API and the endpoints are designed for a specific client. (e.g. A Mobile App or SPA) For us, this also meant a more RPC based API where and reusability is managed after the network hop. https://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bf…
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “Build the Modular Monolith First”Submitted Pattern: Back ends For Front ends (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFrontend development involves I/O (server data fetching), which has implications - it is async - it can fail - it is slow TLDR you need a programmer to hand-orchestrate the I/O. REST (HATEOAS) link abstraction permits a general solution to data-driven user interfaces (this is why web browsers are a generic user interface for simple html-only applications), but they are slow due to the way the data fetching is handle…
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?”Submitted Principles of Microservices (2015) [video] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI actually found the article from Sam Newman went into greater depth: http://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/ Interesting to see this creates new problems, such as blocking calls to dependant services downstream, and what services you declare as critical or not. Also duplicate code is unavoidable. So if you're attempting this pattern, keep those things in mind since you will have limited technology choices.…
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “The ‘Backends for Frontends’ Pattern at SoundCloud”Submitted Don't Call It a Platform as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis approach is described by the cutely named BFF – backend for frontend – pattern. ( https://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/ )
Comment linking /patterns/architectural/bff/
on “Don't build a general-purpose API to power your own front end”Submitted Don't Call It a Platform as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://samnewman.io/books/building_microservices_2nd_editio... ?
Comment linking /books/building_microservices_2nd_edition/
on “The costs of microservices (2020)”Submitted Down with the Platform, Up with Developer Enablement as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
