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I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

robinrendle.com

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Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#161

Post by ivanhoe »

tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #20

I disagree with the article. It's a 1,000 word false dichotomy between Full Stack vs. Insert Specialist Here. Sure, if you're a Fortune 500 company, go ahead and hire a DBA, Cloud Architect, Backend Engineer, UI/UX Designer, Graphic Artist, Social Media Marketer, etc. You'll have a few million $ in salary overhead. It may take longer to produce a final product. BUT, it will probably be way better than a product that…

There's another thing, a team of specialists usually requires more management, planning and a good team culture to avoid "not my job to think about that" syndrome.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#162

Post by justbaker »

chrisabrams wrote: post #63
omni wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should do everyone a solid and name-and-shame the frontend/MySQL company because dear God that's horrifying.

They don’t exist anymore, they didn’t have what it takes :O

They couldn’t hack it..

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#163

Post by ivanhoe »

I think people don't understand what full-stack dev/engineer really is (or should be). It's not a person who knows everything about everything, that's of course impossible, but it's also not a person who knows only a little about everything either. In my eyes a proper full-stack engineer is someone who's currently deeply involved with X, while having a previous experience (of being deeply involved) in Y and Z. As you move from one area of expertise to another you, of course, forget a lot, you fall behind with the latest features and approaches, but you still know enough about it to, first, be able to communicate efficiently with an expert, and the second to be able to relatively quickly get back into the saddle, if needed.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#164

Post by hobs »

Illniyar wrote: post #157
sumedh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe in Specialized front/backend development when it relates to web development. Do you really expect a backend java developer to be comfortable with angular/react and vice a versa?

Indeed. These aren't very complicated subjects, it's easy enough to learn and doesn't require full-time work to become an expert with (and the same goes for backend web development), it merely requires constant practice and dealing with production.

The constant practice and dealing with production your java developer would not have unless that became their job focus.

So are we agreeing that being extremely broad is an anathema to quality because you cant possibly constantly practice will all things?

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#165

Post by Illniyar »

icebraining wrote: post #160
Illniyar wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect senior fullstack developers to have senior level of knowledge and expertise in backend and frontend. I don't expect senior level expertise from junior full-stack developers. For that matter if you were a senior full-stack developer I would expect you to be able to build a production level frontend as well as a production level backend (though maybe not operation-wise, I.E. deployments and configuration, depe…

It all just sounds muddled terminology to me. You say you expect them to have "expertise in backend and frontend", but then you say you wouldn't expect them to have expertise like "know[ing] how browser rendering works". So what is it? :)

There are levels of expertise, even as a senior developer.

I expect a full-stack senior developer to be able to lift a webapp from scratch (frankly I'll probably expect it even from an experienced junior full-stack developer in today's PaSS world). I expect every full-stack senior developer to be able to get the job done in both front-end features and back-end features, as long as they aren't very specific. I expect him to be able to do so in a maintainable and relatively performant way that has structure and consistency behind it.

I expect him to know best practices for both front-end and back-end. In front-end that is for instance knowing that you don't measure dom elements inside animations.

I don't expect him to know the internals that led to these best practices (in this case how the browser works and the nature of the layout phase) nor when is it ok to break them. If best practices were followed but something still doesn't work it's okay to call an expert (for instance an expert on browser performance).

Specializing as a fullstack-developer means that you are also an expert in some field (for instance browser performance, or web animations, or graphs).

Perhaps a better phrasing is that since I don't really expect pure front-end senior developers to know it either, only those who specialize in certain fields, so really a full-stack developer is already a senior front-end developer and a senior back-end developer.

There isn't something that makes a front-end developer more specialized in front-end then a full-stack developer, it's just that he didn't work enough on back-end.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#166

Post by dexterdog »

ivanhoe wrote: post #163

I think people don't understand what full-stack dev/engineer really is (or should be). It's not a person who knows everything about everything, that's of course impossible, but it's also not a person who knows only a little about everything either. In my eyes a proper full-stack engineer is someone who's currently deeply involved with X, while having a previous experience (of being deeply involved) in Y and Z. As you…

That just sounds like an experienced developer. X Y and Z could be Bootstrap, React and Angular. In that case you have an experienced front-end developer. In my view a full-stack developer is somebody who can write front ends, middle tier logic and design and use databases efficiently. In various phases of his career he should have worked specifically in each of these areas in depth. My view also includes the idea that a full-stack dev should understand how computers really work and should be able to spec a server/VM for a specific purpose. There are not many of these people out there. Heck, I was shocked 20 years ago at how few devs that seemed like nerds to me didn't even know how to take apart a desktop and diagnose a problem. Maybe I'm just an old guy and should worry more about the kids on my lawn.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#167

Post by Illniyar »

hobs wrote: post #164
Illniyar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. These aren't very complicated subjects, it's easy enough to learn and doesn't require full-time work to become an expert with (and the same goes for backend web development), it merely requires constant practice and dealing with production.

The constant practice and dealing with production your java developer would not have unless that became their job focus. So are we agreeing that being extremely broad is an anathema to quality because you cant possibly constantly practice will all things?

No. You can be a senior java developer with great expertise with only a part-time job. There's nothing that prevents you from being at a senior level in multiple technologies or fields of study. More then that though, doing both complements each other, so that a senior level full-stack developer often has better insight about server-side issues then someone who only ever knows how to provide back-end solutions to product level problems.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#169

Post by andrewingram »

devereaux wrote: post #58
danieka wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s interesting, I was under the impression that SVGs where smaller for logos and, well, vector graphics. Would you mind sharing what kind of graphics you were working with?

Graph, like a graphic calculator showing f(x). Like you, I would have thought SVGs would be smaller, but experimentation proved that they weren't. It hadn't be checked before, but new options had to be found around the whole stack! So instead of the crispy SVG that scaled so well, now there are some custom-sized PNG instead - served by geographically close VPS. It seems very dirty on paper, but in practice it works m…

If you only display the images at a predefined size, a PNG (designed for that size) will be crisper than an SVG. Discovered this at a previous job where we were doing a rebrand, we were using SVGs for the logo and monograms on the website and the designers complained that they didn't look good. We compared them with equivalent PNGs and the quality was much better.

General guidance:

* Photo - Use JPG, WebP or similar

* Images used at a single predefined size, where quality matters, e.g. logos - Use PNG

* UI graphics that are displayed at integer multiples of the base size, eg 24, 48, 72 - Use SVG

* Illustration graphics - investigate trade-offs between size and quality for both SVG and PNG

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#170

Post by heavenlyblue »

andrewingram wrote: post #169
devereaux wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graph, like a graphic calculator showing f(x). Like you, I would have thought SVGs would be smaller, but experimentation proved that they weren't. It hadn't be checked before, but new options had to be found around the whole stack! So instead of the crispy SVG that scaled so well, now there are some custom-sized PNG instead - served by geographically close VPS. It seems very dirty on paper, but in practice it works m…

If you only display the images at a predefined size, a PNG (designed for that size) will be crisper than an SVG. Discovered this at a previous job where we were doing a rebrand, we were using SVGs for the logo and monograms on the website and the designers complained that they didn't look good. We compared them with equivalent PNGs and the quality was much better. General guidance: * Photo - Use JPG, WebP or similar…

Or your SVGs were desined in Illustrator without actually modifying the code so that all of the coordinates in them would be integers.

Had this issue about 5 years ago. Good SVGs need to go through a manual code filtering step.

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