202x - Full Stack Engineer 201x - Web Developer 200x - Webmaster 199x - Guy with a computer That's how I remember it.
Webmaster is still the best title.
Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#12Full stack?
Must mean you're able to design an instruction set, design chips, circuit diagrams, pcbs and finally write the firmware for it so it can boot the operating system you'll write, along with the drivers you write, so you can finally write some applications that runs on this new machine ;)
dunno, maybe it goes deeper.. something about sand, and how it's hard to make even a toaster from scratch*
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#13"Full-Stack Developer" is a term derived from the term "Application Tech Stack", which is a term used for a comprehensive description of all the major tech used to deliver an application. A Full-Stack Developer is capable of working through the entire Application Stack. It's a relative term, relative to the technology you work on and the domain you work within. Many components in the stack are off-the-shelf.
It's tricky when talking about SPAs because while we call SPAs "applications" they almost universally are only thin-client frontends over an API. I wouldn't call the Washington Post's frontend an actual application, nor would I call the Mixpanel UI an application. It gets fuzzier with things like Slack and Spotify.
Personally, when I hire, I only hire full-stack web developers and my expectation is that they're just as comfortable rendering HTML on the backend as the frontend (and they have a pragmatic sense for what is appropriate when), they have no problems manipulating the underlying database schema, they can manage the caching system, jobs system, email delivery, etc. Not everyone is amazing at everything but everyone needs to be familiar and moderately comfortable doing most things, and the team is there to backfill anyone's personal gaps.
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#14Full stack means they don't want to pay for specialists. So you will now be expected to do three people's jobs: Dev Ops - Backend - Frontend You'll also be implicitly on-call at all times despite that fact never being verbalized.
This is not at all fullstack to me.
Imho; a fullstack developer is a person who can develop all pieces of an application (or game, or whatever) and put it in production, maintain it, improve it.
I.e. design the database or other persistence, implement the layers that manages the data, the business logic and the user interface.
It can be very different from different applications, of course, since some may not have an ui, or a persistence requirement.
It is a person who not only knows how to write code, but also understands how code communicates with services and humans.
A fullstack developer understands OS and computing in general.
When I build teams, I like to have a mix of fullstack, frontend and backend developers because the experts (i.e specialized Devs) often handle the nitty gritty details of front- or backend, whereas the fullstack glues together the front-, back- and ops.
Usually fullstackers are the kind of people who say "oh, interesting problem, let's explore" rather than "I don't know this technology, I am a (Fe|be) developer.
You will rarely hear a full stack developer say "I'm unable to continue, because I have to wait for the (dba|integration team|ops team)". They will solve their problems and often has enough experience to do it well.
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#15202x - Full Stack Engineer 201x - Web Developer 200x - Webmaster 199x - Guy with a computer That's how I remember it.
Webmaster is still the best title.
> If Saskia could be guarded by men in bearskin hats riding horses, why, she could as well have a webmaster.
Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#16I've been programming (now mostly prototyping/managing/architecting) since the early 90's, so for me "full stack" includes:
- Embedded software/firmware development in ASM/C/C++ (microprocessors, drivers, RTOS, various on-board and external interfaces and buses.
- Various communication protocols running on top of various wired and wireless topologies.
- Developing front-end applications as mobile apps, desktop apps, and web-based apps.
- Developing back-end systems using a variety of architectures (monolithic, serverless, containers)
- Designing and developing entities, schemas, and API's for the system.
- DevOps
- Gluing all this shit together so that it works.
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#17Full stack? Must mean you're able to design an instruction set, design chips, circuit diagrams, pcbs and finally write the firmware for it so it can boot the operating system you'll write, along with the drivers you write, so you can finally write some applications that runs on this new machine ;) dunno, maybe it goes deeper.. something about sand, and how it's hard to make even a toaster from scratch* * https://www.…
but wait the toaster had no electrical wires??
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#18well, for web it ought to include some knowledge of, and ability to debug, the underlying protocols, HTTP[S], TCP, IPv4/v6. And modern Ethernet switching. On the host side, network sockets and some kernel implementation chops. At the lower end of the stack, modern processor/memory performance architecture, beginning with a basic understanding of instruction sets. Ability in some hardware design language would be good…
In what context would one realistically be able to debug TCP/IPv4/IPv6? Also in terms of network sockets and kernel implementation you're talking about apples and oranges.
_slightly_ tongue-in-cheek, because i'm annoyed by people calling the top 3% "full" stack
But, an example is discovering from the DSACK responses that your network performance sucks because the intel TCP offload firmware is retransmitting entire jumbograms when any packet gets lost.
Also discovering that you can't get near full network bandwidth because some moron attaches a 3-byte SNAP header.
And if you don't have some idea how your programming language works, how do you know what you're doing? When a memory cache miss costs the equivalent of several hundred instructions.
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#19Cheap developer that can easily be moved to any kind of position? :)
Re: Poll: What does “Full Stack” mean?
#20I made a joke on Facebook a few years back about true 'full stack' development. It was a post talking about some code I was writing to do some math computation on a simple OS I had written, running on a CPU I designed using my own custom instruction set, implemented in logic on a physical PCB I also designed and assembled.
Of course even this is really only 'partial stack', since I didn't do the VLSI design of the 74x series ICs I was using. So when I think full stack, I think high level code all the way down the transistors. Anything else is weak sauce. ;) ;).