How To Speed Up Your Frontend Web Development 10x

What causes delays to you as a frontend developer ?

Learning to cope with delays in Web development is a common practice for all skill levels. As a beginner/junior frontend dev myself i know how taxing it can be spending time in something like, waiting on a backend team for APIs.

Not only does this happen more often than you think, but can also be caused for a myriad of reasons; miscommunication or misunderstanding of a core concept,
sometimes the data from API responses is in the wrong format,
Conflicting ideas on how to handle complex and tricky integrations due to a lack of data flexibility?

All of which causes:
Clients & higher-ups to become unhappy because deadlines get extended,
developers become unhappy because their personal work deadlines are extended and work is throttled.

But after all is said and done, one thing that we can’t get past is the presence of Delay.

So what solutions can we use to get past these delays?

Now look if the backend team is going to take time to give me the data we need, there’s not much we can do to accelerate that process, but instead of using this time as an excuse for endless chai breaks, i propose the use of Mock APIs.

A mock api is ideally an api that you create, and works the same in every regard, but you can customise what data it should return.

This personally i feel is a great idea because while you might be throttled due to a lack of APIs, you can create these APIs, customise how you want the data to be returned, write the functions and in a sense, keep things ready. Not only does this save you a lot of time when the actual API comes your way, because all you’ll have to do is just replace the API string, but also I also found that you’ll already have a deeper understanding of how you should expect the data. This allows you to not only catch future keys or requirements you may need in the response but also accelerates the process of facilitating any small changes that may or may not be required.

Now look, i’m not suggesting that every frontend dev that’s deadlocked, setup express servers to create mock apis. That’s a somewhat lengthy and a rather redundant approach. Luckily we have access to multiple online sources that based on a few clicks, have your APIs ready for you.

How do I use this right now ?

One that I personally used was called Requestly, and it was very simple and straightforward to get what I wanted.

Just setup the chrome extension,
Open the dashboard,
Click on create new api,
Create the data how you need to,
And done!

Your api is ready to use. You can use it in your code, pass the data down to the components and test everything out.
Once your fit and finish is done all you have to do is replace the mock api with the real one, test everything again and adjust accordingly.

And also Requestly’s only one service there’s also mockAPI.io and Mocki.io which work in a similar way.

With this you can speed up your api integration and frontend web development 10x in the long run.