Traditionally developers are divided into frontend and backend developers; this is due to the division of responsibility between the external representation of the project (frontend) and internal technology (backend). Very roughly summarizing, we can say that the frontend develops the interface that users see, and the backend does the “stuffing”, ie the hardware and software part. This division is logical and was created to simplify project development. However, more and more often full-stack developers appear in the IT environment. I will tell you about who they are and what technologies are relevant to a full-stack developer below.
Definition
A full-stack developer is a developer who must understand the whole stack of technologies and components used in the project, both in frontend and backend parts. At the same time, a full-stack developer does not need to be an expert in all of the technologies that are used to develop an application.
As a rule, a full-stack developer must completely cover the entire development stack, including knowledge of servers, operating systems and different databases, as well as PaaS.
But there are also simplified types of fullstack – for example, a fullstack WordPress developer. This is a developer who can make and deploy sites on WordPress. In general, the definition of and requirements for such a developer can vary.
A fullstack developer has its own plans and minuses.
Pros:
Knowledge of many technologies allows him to choose where to go next; it’s easier for him to retool.
The work is varied, as there is an opportunity to change projects, try different options and technologies.
Fullstack developers understand how many technologies work, so they can choose a good solution for a project, fix the bugs of existing projects, and so on.
Of course, there are also enough disadvantages:
Compared to a highly specialized developer, a fullstack developer has less knowledge in each area (that is, his knowledge works in breadth rather than depth).
It follows from the previous point that it is more difficult for him to develop – he has to master everything at once, rather than concentrate on development in one direction.
A Fullstack developer often has no fixed area of responsibility, which makes it even harder to replace him with another specialist.
You need to be able to plan your work well in order to keep up with everything and everywhere – otherwise you risk overloading yourself with tasks.
If, despite this, you still decided to become a full-time developer, then below I will list the current (at this time) technologies that you definitely need to learn.
HTML and CSS – the basics. Any web developer should know HTML and CSS. HTML allows you to add content to the site, and CSS is responsible for the style of that content. The topics that most often come up when talking about HTML/CSS during a job interview:
Semantic HTML layout.
Block (boxed) CSS model.
Benefits of CSS preprocessors: LESS, Sass, Stylus, and others.
CSS media queries.
Bootstrap (a framework with tools to build websites and applications).
JavaScript
JavaScript (JS) is a language which becomes more and more popular every year, with more and more libraries, frameworks and tools.
Interestingly, in the 2016 Stack Overflow survey, JS was the most popular language in all three areas: fullstack, frontend, and backend. In the 2017 survey, JS was simply the most popular language among all programming languages. No surprise there – JS is the only programming language that is used both in the browser and as a server-side language (thanks to Node.js). As a full-stack developer, you need to understand the following topics:
Working with the DOM. It is also desirable to know what is and be able to use JSON.
Important features of the language: composition of functions, class inheritance, event delegation, higher-order functions.
Event handling (including asynchronous), promises and colbacks (callback functions).
Proper code structuring and working with modules.
Knowledge of webpack, browserify and gulp.
Knowledge of at least one popular framework (React, AngularJS…). In general, an understanding of JS itself is more important than knowledge of frameworks, as any of them will then be easy to understand.
Knowledge of jQuery.
Automated testing.
Backend language
Now we must move on to the backend, which is responsible for working with the database, user authentication and the logic of the application as a whole. It is not so important which language you choose, the main thing is to really understand it and know all the nuances. If you ask on any popular site what backend language is the best to learn, you will get a lot of answers: you will hear both good and bad things about each language.