According to World Economic Forum, software developers are the fourth largest among emerging job roles.
Who is a Full Stack Developer?
A full stack developer has a range of skills. Such a person is an engineer who can handle all the databases, servers, systems engineering, and clients.
Depending on the nature of the project, customers may require a mobile stack, a web stack, or a native application stack.
Why We Need Full Stack Developers
In the past, a full stack development company relied on hiring/very skilled personnel like front-end developers, back-end developers, database engineers, testers, site reliability engineers among others.
These experts worked on specific aspects of the software development life cycle(SDLC). The emergence of various frameworks, tools, and libraries have provided a platform for individuals to handle end-to-end development of software application as well as building, testing and deploying applications.
As a result, this has led to the emergence of the full stack developers able to handle end-to-end development of apps as well as use the applications.
To become a great full stack developer requires a set of certain attributes.
- Engineering mindset: you must have the inherent joy of coming up with new things and ideas
- Logical and problem solving mindset: you have to possess analytical and logical angel when solving issues.
- Patience and perseverance: just like my high school motto- you must learn to take things one at a time without getting weary.
Being a full stack developer requires you to be skilled in all the back-end and all front-end technologies.
To become a full stack developer, you need the following.
Choose a Tech Stack
Currently, there are many languages/frameworks to choose. Some of the important decision points based on current industry trends include:
- Front-end frameworks i.e. Angular vs React
- Back-end languages - Java(Spring) vs Node.js(Express)
- Database -mySQL vs MongoDB
You have a choice between MEAN/MERN stack which is a complete JavaScript based stack to build applications or Java(Spring) +React/Angular for building web applications.
However, the main idea is to remain with the same stack and build experience and proficiency simultaneously.
1. Mean Stack
The MEAN stack is founded on JavaScript-based technologies. Despite its derogative name, it is very important because it is fast, robust and maintainable production web applications.
It is composed of four elements as follows.
MongoDB
- It is a NoSQL database that stores data in binary JSON format.
- Express
- It is a web program framework that is user friendly, light and portable.
- Angular.js
- This is a robust framework that is used for developing HTML5 and JavaScript-web programs
- Node.js
- It is a server side JavaScript execution environment
2. Mern Stack
The Mern stack is founded on JavaScript-based technologies just like Mean stack. It has four major components as follows.
- MongoDB
It is a NoSQL database that stores data in binary JSON format.
- Express
It is a web program framework famous for being easy to use, light and portable.
- React
This is a JavaScript library that is used for building user interfaces.
- Node.js
It is a server-side JavaScript execution environment such as in a Node.js development company.
3. Lamp Stack
The Lamp stack is a very popular stack that forms the foundation of Linux hosted websites. It comprises four important components as follows.
- Linux
This is an open source operating system that forms the foundation for the stack model.
- Apache
It is a web server software that translates from web browsers to the required website.
- MySQL
It is an open source database that can be queried by the scripting language to construct a website.
- PHP
This is a server-side open source scripting language.
Front-End Development
To become a full stack developer, you need apt skills in front-end development as it deals with the application parts that the users interact with directly on the screen.
The main technologies you need to get accomplished in front-end are HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. In addition, you need some knowledge on some third-party libraries like jQuerry, Angular and ReactJs.
Back End Development
While the front-end focusses on the part that the user can see, back-end is usually the mystery behind the real mechanics of an application.
It takes care of the database operations, user authentication and application logic. There is a wide range of languages that you can use for back-end development such as Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJs among others.
Usually, each developer chooses a language of their choice but each of these languages have particular market demand for suitable projects. For instance, companies looking to hire Node JS developer will need a candidate with good skills in Node.js.
It has been noted that the majority of startups which are seeking for faster implementations and working on small-scale/internal products choose the MEAN/MERN stack.
However, majority of the enterprise applications which are complex and handle large scale use Java as the preferred back-end language
Find a Skilled Mentor
Out there, you can find extensive content to learn different language. However, one of the hardest thing to come by is a good mentor ready to assist you with this difficult task.
It is wise to find yourself a mentor- preferably a senior software engineer or an architect in your company. This person will guide you in your code reviews to sharpen your coding skills.
Build Applications
There are many free and open-source tools at your disposal out there, all that is required is a good laptop, internet connection and enough patience and effort from your side to start building applications.
Today, you cannot give an excuse for not building an application- go build some right away.
Read the Blog: Top 5 Full-Stack Node.Js Frameworks for App Development
However, you need to choose the applications to build carefully because you want to be relevant to the various domain use cases like e-commerce, banking and finance, supply chain among others.
This will enable companies looking to hire you find relevant software development experience.
Databases
An aspiring Full stack developer cannot survive without knowing how to make application databases. Databases form an important part of application as they are key to storing and accessing any data on an application.
As a developer, you have to know how to divide between Relational and NoSQL databases to know the situations in which to make use of either of them. You should be familiar with each type of database such as MySQL, MongoDB among others. Moreover, you need to possess knowledge of caching options such as Memcached, Redis, and Varnish.
Version Control System
Currently, there are multiple versions of an application. In case on of such versions was to be recalled, then this is where version control comes in.
it is simply a system that records the changes made to the application files over time, in order for specific versions to be recalled later if need be.
Git particularly, is aversion control system that can be used to obtain the latest code, and modify other people's code without to creating problems in the process.
