Backend Boundaries for Frontend Developers

Frontend developers keep getting handed backend-shaped decisions. Not in the grand architecture-diagram sense, but in the everyday sense: where should this data load, where should this mutation live, where do we check the session, where do we reshape the API response, and how much product logic is too much for a route handler? This talk gives frontend and full-stack JavaScript developers a practical map for those decisions. Using patterns from React Router, Remix-style apps, and Node.js backends, we’ll sort server-side frontend code into three useful buckets: route-scoped, client-scoped, and domain-scoped. That framing helps answer a deceptively simple question: should this logic live near the screen, behind a BFF, or behind a clearer shared capability? Attendees will leave with better language for decisions they are already making — and a sharper instinct for when “just put it in the route” is clean, pragmatic design versus the first draft of tomorrow’s architecture problem.