Back in college, I used to think that a “real” programmer built everything from scratch.
If you didn’t write every line of code yourself, it somehow didn’t count.
That, I believed, was what proved mastery.
But once I joined a professional development team, that belief quickly disappeared.
In the real world, time is money.
The longer it takes to build something, the more it costs — not just in hours, but in missed opportunities.
The goal isn’t to reinvent the wheel. It’s to deliver value efficiently.
Frameworks Don’t Make You Less of a Developer
Using frameworks and libraries doesn’t mean you don’t understand technology — it means you know how to leverage it.
You’re standing on the shoulders of those who’ve already solved the same problems, so you can move faster and focus on what truly matters.
Of course, understanding what’s happening under the hood is still important.
That knowledge helps you debug, optimize, and maintain your applications when things inevitably go wrong.
My First Encounter with Frameworks
In my early days as a developer, I worked with Angular, Ionic, and the Slim Microframework.
Before frameworks like Angular, we used to manipulate the DOM manually with plain JavaScript — a tedious, repetitive process that made codebases messy and hard to maintain.
Then came jQuery, which simplified DOM manipulation but still required us to manage everything by hand.
Modern frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue changed the game completely.
They abstracted away low-level DOM operations and introduced declarative programming — a mindset shift where we define what the UI should look like, not how to build it step by step.
Now, when the state changes, the UI updates automatically.
Building Once, Deploying Everywhere
Then there was Ionic, which opened my eyes to hybrid app development.
Instead of writing separate codebases for iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin/Java), and the web (JavaScript), we could build a single application that runs on all platforms.
From a business perspective, that meant faster delivery and lower costs — without sacrificing user experience.
Discovering APIs and Separation of Concerns
Another game-changer for me was working with the Slim Microframework.
Back in college, we built everything as a monolithic application — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL all tangled together in one massive codebase.
The term “UI” and “API” barely existed in my vocabulary back then.
With Angular and Slim, that changed.
We learned to separate the system into two parts:
- Frontend (Angular) – handles the user interface, data presentation, and interactions.
- Backend (Slim Microframework) – handles the business logic, data processing, and database operations through exposed API endpoints.
This separation made everything more modular, maintainable, and scalable.
Why It Mattered
Splitting the frontend and backend allowed us to:
- Assign focused tasks — UI-related work vs. API-related work.
- Reuse the same backend logic across web and mobile apps.
- Debug faster — if it wasn’t a UI bug, it had to be an API issue.
That clarity changed how I thought about development forever.
The Takeaway
Frameworks and libraries aren’t shortcuts — they’re accelerators.
They let developers focus on problem-solving rather than rebuilding solutions that already exist.
Looking back, frameworks didn’t make me less of a developer — they made me a more efficient one.
And that’s what real-world engineering is all about: building smarter, not slower.
