WHO IS A 'FULL STACK DEVELOPER'?

CAN I DO IT ALL? WHO IS A “FULL STACK DEVELOPER”?

How a developer Might be seen in Nigeria.
For about a while this term has lingered in my mind “WHO IS A FULL STACK DEVELOPER” most a times a look a the term from the angle which is “CAN YOU DO IT ALL”, Some employers in would love a full stack developer so as to cut down on the salary which should be paid to two separate developers who has grounded expertise in the Two playing fields.

Last week I was posed with the question are you a “Full Stack Developer” for a moment there I still thought of the best reply to give. I would love to give a concise answer here, At first I had no real concise answer to this, I would love to answer this question in a way that it benefits developers both experienced and non-experienced touching the finer details. You may have repeatedly come across the words “full-stack developer” in job advertisements or online MOOC websites. Or you may just be curious as to why this term has been trending lately more than traditional terms.

I would do my best to explain this term to the best of my knowledge, so let’s begin the discussion.

Let’s consider the term Jack Of All

The Jack of all is a concept that has been around for a while that describes the abilities or characteristics of an individual who has taken his time to learn about most trades and has ideas and knowledge of most of them. The Ideal person has experience and specialty in these trades.

A full stack developer could be seen as such a person, having read and have experience in most languages.

Front-End Development

Another question within this field also is “I AM A FRONT END DESIGNER OR DEVELOPER”, These terms I would not treat separately in this article but as one entity.

The toolbelt (skillset) of a front end developer or designer involves the actual presentation of your website – how the information in your website is displayed in browsers and on mobile devices as well. An experienced front-end developer will be very comfortable working with HTML and CSS as well as Javascript, as a scripting language. With these web languages, the developer can efficiently manipulate the information on a website to make it appealing to visitor, and function properly..

Everything that is seen on a website – the layout, the positioning of text and images, colors, fonts, buttons, and so on – are all factors that the front-end developer must put into consideration.

The main goal of a front-end developer is to provide the platform for visitors to interact with, a platform which provides to visitors and receives information from them. This means some developers will be well-versed in web design and using software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, sketch, figma and other visual tools to create graphics and themed layouts.

Additional skillsets of a front-end developer could include user experience design(UX) and user interface design(UI), skills which help a team evaluate the best methods of displaying and collecting information. A front-end developer who possesses these design skills may be more valuable as they can identify the look and feel of a site while assessing the technical capabilities,responses of such a design at the same time. Although these additional skillsets might be useful to a developer they are certainly not a requirement for the job in some companies, and more and more companies are seeing the value in hiring UX & UI designers to focus solely on this aspect of website development. Although in Nigeria, this might not be the norm, as companies are still on the look out for a robot, who can do it all.

Back-End Development

I am conversant with database creation and sending and receiving data to and fro from the back end.

Creation, edit/update and recollection of data are some of the processes that are most often associated with back-end development. Some examples of common scripting languages used are PHP, Ruby, Python and node Js. With these languages, a back-end developer can create algorithms and business logic to manipulate the data that was received in front-end development.

This means that a back-end developer must be able to write code to receive the information input from the user and also save it somewhere – like in a database. There are two main types of databases: relational (like PostgreSQL and MySQL) and non-relational management systems (like Mongo). The language used for database management is SQL, which helps the developer interact with the database.

The concepts might sound foreign, but just understand that there are different database management systems based on convenience and use.

Another component of back-end development is server management, which are applications that host the database and serve up the website. An alternative to knowing how to manage servers is to use cloud-based platforms that provide the infrastructure, like Heroku or Amazon Web Services.

Understanding server management allows a developer to troubleshoot slow applications and even determine how scalable their websites are to scale up to include more users.

I use Frameworks, Am I a lazy developer?

Rather than having to rewrite the wheel everyday to develop complex proprietary code for creating different websites add systems, frameworks have become popular resources to help make these processes more efficient and convenient. Libraries like Angular, JQuery, React amongst many are extremely popular for front-end developers using Javascript, as they can implement various functions that other developers have already cultivated and tested.

On the backend, there are frameworks like Express for Node Js,Rails for the programming language of Ruby, Django or flask for Python, and laravel for working with PHP.

Should I Become A Full-Stack Developer?

Given the choice to specialize in front-end or back-end development, why would any developer choose to learn the full spectrum?

It all depends on you but you’d be more valuable to a team or company if you have grounded ideas in both area, you could easily help connect the dots on the i’s.

In other words, a developer who can readily assess and communicate how a website should look, feel, and manipulate data while understanding the technical limitations of such implementations will be a respected and valuable member of any team or company which he/she belongs to.

In Conclusion

There are loads of resource to help you become a full stack developer. Google the phrase “how to be full-stack developer” and you will get tons of pages of different venues and methods to learn. But you’re probably at the start of the journey and don’t feel like you have the knowledge to differentiate between the self-guides, Pdf Tutorials, YouTube videos, online moocs such as Udacity, Udemy and so on and Bootcamps.

First you could review this decision by asking yourself questions like:

“How much front-end development is involved?”
“What will I learn for back-end development?”
“What programming languages and frameworks are being taught?”.

A full-stack developer has all the keys to the Jobs in his tool belt– there is no door that you cannot open. It gives you a taste of being the master of the internet. Keeping Yourself Abreast puts food on your table constantly in a country like Nigeria.