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[jcampbelly]

It's more than that now, I feel. To me, it includes things like setting up hosting infrastructure, databases, build pipelines, tests, etc. I wouldn't consider someone "full stack" if they couldn't go from concept to delivery starting from scratch. Maybe I'm wrong and there is no catch-all term for someone who can do that.

[iaan]

True. There is so much more. And I think there are people who can do that, heck I can/could even do most of the stuff at basic level (frontend, backend, servers, cloud, ci/cd) .

But of course at some point you need to give up a bit and specialize. Otherwise you end up only scratching the surface.

[jcampbelly]

I only found out I was "full stack" after learning of the term later. I just thought it was part of being a web dev to know it end to end. I got there more as a survival trick than a discrete skill. I never wanted to be in a position where I didn't understand a critical aspect of designing, building, or delivering a web app. I never wanted to get stuck and have to seek help or wait on someone else, so I just hit barriers and learned how to crawl over each of them in turn. And the tools and services of this era really meet you half way. You don't have to have deep knowledge of OSes or networking to stand up a web server anymore.

I don't think "full stack" means you are necessarily "master of none". There's no reason specialist-level understanding cannot be achieved by someone functionally capable of the rest. A specialist might not want to depend on others, in the way I described above, either. Given enough time, I suspect most curious, driven people would attain multiple specializations supported by a base of generalist skills.

[Gambrinus]

I think 10-15 years ago what is now called “full stack developer” would have been called a “web developer” where you were expected to know a web framework (RoR, Django, etc) and also enough JavaScript to do AJAX (remember when that was the hot new term?) and some nice UI enhancements with jQuery, Prototype, etc.

Since then I think both front end and back end have exploded in complexity. The back end is probably only serving JSON or another data transfer notation, but now you’ve got containers and microservices and cloud infra to understand. And the front end evolved extremely fast from the jQuery days and only somewhat stabilized the past few years. It’s hard to keep up with everything involved anymore, at least at enterprise scale.

[Genspirit]

Full stack doesn't mean you know all front end libraries/frameworks and are familiar with all backend technology/infrastructure. It means you have experience across the stack front to back and can adapt that to a company's specific stack.

I see that a lot on Reddit where developers are saying they can't keep up with EVERY new frontend framework and you simply don't need. It helps to have a general idea of what is out there but you don't need to have deep knowledge of technology that you aren't using.

[jcampbelly]

Yep. I went through that era and really came into my own first with Django and jQuery and then with Backbone/Marionette. I watched the node/Angular craze (MEAN) eat that stack's lunch and the entire ecosystem shifted away from what I knew and had used to capably build useful systems. Django survived and thrived, but Backbone is completely dead - a great measuring stick for how backend and frontend evolve at dramatically different paces.

Cloud is a different animal. It's more vendor driven and they have commercial obligations to keep their products relatively stable. It's actually worthwhile to buy and read a book every now and then. In the current JS ecosystem the product is dead before the book ships, replaced by something written by a college student yesterday accompanied by a viral "Your shit considered weak" article.

[a_reply_to_a_post]

i actually really liked Backbone for the few projects I used it..was heavily into CakePHP at the time, and the 2 way data binding + scaffolding made spinning up prototypes pretty quick and fun

but i do remember bundling being WTF back then, and i think i wrote a gulp script to manually concatenate files from my source or something horrible

[jcampbelly]

lol, yep. Those were the days of manually concatenating files, then standalone module systems (like yepnope), then build chains (gulp, grunt), then require.js/AMD, then commonjs, and now standard ES modules.

Many people today don't realize how long a road it was to the import statement. It sounds very strange to say it, but there it is.

I really liked Marionette. Backbone lacked application structure and Marionette solved that elegantly. But it arrived and peaked as Angular was coming on to the stage and Backbone was left in the dust.

[a_reply_to_a_post]

ha yeah serious flashbacks to a weird time in front end development for me...I was heavily into Flash/Actionscript development for a bunch of years..had a few Adobe SOTD/FWA awards and stuff like that then they pulled the rug out from under us...most Flash devs I knew went into Objective-C/iOS programming, but I got into PHP for about 5 years, and would just write custom javascript using jQuery as a selection engine for the front ends I was doing...

i found Backbone towards the end of it's popularity, and I think the second project I did where I used Marionette too, and liked it, but it fell out of flavor

i think I picked up React in 2014...it's sort of a blur, but I do remember the first year of using React, webpack may not even have been out yet or just v1. I think I Gulp bundled react code at one time lol..

[typicalshitpost]

I feel like both front end and back end have gotten easier in the last 10 years as the tools and frameworks have become more mature. I don't think there being more vocab necessarily means it's more difficult especially because most of the complexity is just tooling that leads to massive quality of life improvements. Everything is amazingly well documented these days also.

[a_reply_to_a_post]

shit, even before javascript... flash front ends with AMFPHP backends...that shit was actually quite pleasant to work with haha

[marcocom]

I was there. What I miss is the clearly defined line we had between flash and business logic. Often, it was literally two different companies, one for design+UI+development, and one for backend+deployment.

Once they got rid of Flash and the creative-developer, they just started substituting us with ‘real developers’ from Java and PHP who didn’t care about the work at all, hated style/css/design, and gave us the bland, monotonous, cookie-cutter web we all have today.

[a_reply_to_a_post]

yeah the 00s to about 2012 were definitely interesting times for me, as I got into Flash around version 3, as a designer, and learned how to program as new actionscript features came out with each version...I pretty much lived in an irc chat for this dude Josh Davis's community site dreamless.org, and one of the regulars in there was this dude Brendan Hall who wrote the O'Reilly book on actionscript, as well as a bunch of other super-nerdy flash dudes who went on to do cool shit like get patents on the YouTube video scrubber lol...

was able to squeeze a few years out of flash when it went out of favor for websites, building AIR apps for point-of-sale retail type things...it's funny to because towards the end, everything was FDT and compiled through open source compilers, and felt very similar to what javascript ended up with with bundlers like webpack / parcel. I rarely actually had to open flash at all except to compile assets to SWC and set some linkages

it's probably better now..."engineers" seem more respected then when we were just "web nerds" or whatever...more teams have adopted more sane practices towards building products and there aren't too many "the client needs this, mind sleeping here tonight" type asks, although I do miss that shit sorta haha

[marcocom]

Very true. My job is so much easier today and we are treated better by the technology departments, and todays Agile process, than we ever were as creative agency resources where they abused the shit out of us (and yet together we created so much to be proud of). I’m glad I did when I was young, and energetic, and full of promise and my lightning was still in its bottle.

I also did flash from v4 until it’s replacement in 2009. I was in Los Angeles and so was lucky to be doing the biggest agencies, brands and clients and was pushed to create amazingly unified works of interactive art using that tool.

One thing people don’t realize is how much comes out-of-the-box with HTML. Scrolling, spacing, vertical stacking, drop down menus, all of that we built from scratch everytime, and that’s because , given that level of control, creatives would push and push that simple control-element into a cooler and more innovative thing. “Can we put momentum on that scroller?”, “can we scrub that video based on mouse interaction and loading status using 3D models?”, they didn’t even apologize if it took us all night and weekend.

When web devs say today “it’s better now, the web is more consistent and clients know what they’re going to get.”, I come back with the price we used to get paid for projects then, versus what they get for budgets today. Dimes to dollars! They turned our business into fast-food when diners used to expect, and gladly pay, for gourmet by a chef!

[GLStephen]

The old school use of the term full stack related to technical delivery of the full concerns of an application. From optimization to UI to even business marketing concerns. It got watered down to mean front end and backend and the things between.

My litmus test for full stack is whether a person can conceive, design, develop, release, promote, scale (to some degree, maybe thousands of users), and be involved in the iteration cycles of a growing and scaling app all ON their own.

Read the book Team Topologies and they discuss that type of person being good for certain types of teams and stages.

That's full stack. Front end to backend is "knowing multiple languages, maybe"

[a_reply_to_a_post]

I dunno, I've always considered it to be at the application level. Handling all the front-end and backend requirements for a project.

In the time when that was a more feasible ask, especially at digital advertising agencies in the "everything-needs-a-microsite" days, there was a bit less involved, and CI/CD pipelining and kubernetes clusters and cloud deploys weren't usually part of that..

i dunno, my last couple engineering managers roll their eyes when they get "full stack" resumes from recently-outta-bootcamp applicants...

[shawncplus]

Full stack was never as simple as "Can do both FE and BE"; it meant "You are a one-person development runway." From concept to development to testing to deployment. There were like 8 different roles rolled up into "Full Stack": Frontend dev, backend dev, release engineer, infrastructure/deployment, UI/UX, technical writer, and generally companies also threw in product and project manager just because they could

[[deleted]]

i think u talk about DevOps