Full stack developer

I say go for whatever keeps your interest and perfect that area. Also, it's always good to explore stuff out of your safe zone. Basically, that is how you end up becoming a full stack dev. The main thing is do what interests you.

I do full stack, my weak point is decidedly CSS, but as I generally am working with dedicated front end devs, I'm ok with that.

Primarily I am a back end dev, but I do a good deal of client side JS work as well. I would argue that with frameworks like Angular, Ember, Vue, React, etc.. that kind of front end javascript is more 'back end' type dev that just happens to run in the browser though.

There's only so much time in the day to learn things, so you can be good at both, but practically it will take you twice as long to reach the same standard, or you'll be lacking in specialisms for both in the same timeframe.

I'm primarily a front end dev, but have been working with PHP for around 15 years, but never considered myself "full stack", more a front end guy with reasonable back end skills.

However, my previous two jobs have both been full stack (using Laravel, which I'm now pretty comfy with) and I was the only developer, so I now loosely call myself a "front-end, full-stack developer" and caveat this for any jobs I go with that a "real" back end guy will know far more than me about database flavours, security, and all the other "back end" stuff than I, so if they need something really up there, either to hire someone else, or to have me work with a primarily back end guy.

The one thing I can't stand is supposedly "full stack" folks who don't caveat their areas of expertise. I worked on a Rails/JavaScript site last year where the front end was written mainly by a "full stack" Node guy (it's all JavaScript, right!?) and it was an absolute f-ing mess.

Front end is now so technical that it makes it very difficult to be across both disciplines and really compete (though Node does at least put it all within one language; Meteor being an interesting example as well).

One of the phrases I've heard recently is "full stack integrator" which I think makes a lot of sense, and if you google the same term, you'll see a lot of people talking about "the myth of the full stack developer".

Food for thought!

I to am classified as full stack. But as others mentioned it's hard to stay on top of everything. I don't know Angular and very little react for example. But excellent at backend using laravel and Yii. I can work with send and symfony....

Point is as you spread out you limit your ability to master any one thing. Gods at a lot, master of none.

Now if you search those hire-a-developer boards you should get a good chuckle but also a little scared about the code being produced. I don't care how smart you are you can not be an expert in php, c#, Java, JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, react, CSS and HTML. No way, no how. I use to be a .net about 6 years ago. I truly believe I couldn't effectively read the code now much less code with it.

Many places want a full stack but really means: server, database and backend with okay frontend (usually).

Programming is logic and the Heart of all programming is things such as if else constructs. Everything else is icing.

@jlrdw Unless you're a front end developer working primarily in css/html. All the ifs and elses in the world won't help you there.

I'm a "one man team" and yes, it's hard to try and remember everything.

I love Laravel and that has helped me a lot, I'm not sure I could do my current role if just using PHP.

I'm trying to learn Vue at the moment and have realised that my JS isn't that great (not by modern standards).

I just think you have to realise that you can't be an expert at every aspect of development (and have alife and family) and may need to cheat (thankyou Bootstrap) in some places.

Just be honest with yourself and prospective employers.

Mick

I'm primarily Front-end as i came from a Design background my strength lies there but i want to learn back-end and start building more projects on my own in my own time without the worry of other team members

I'm 15+ years PHP/Ruby frameworks but with the success of frontend frameworks I felt the need to learn a lot more Javascript these past 12-months. Currently I build Restful APIs in Lumen & Laravel and frontends in NG2 with Sass Bootstrap and Gulp. Also starting on NodeJS.

I would consider myself full stack. And whilst I may not be the most technical person in our team I can engineer all aspects of a decoupled SPA using my chosen skillset and deploy to AWS inside Docker containers.

You don't have to stay on top of everything. Choose your weapons on a project by project basis.

I just saw this on CommitStrip which may at least amuse you :)