What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)

seems appropriate that the first sentence includes a mistake in article about an idiot making excuses for other idiots.

I agree that a full-stack developer should have familiarity with Linux, setting up servers, configuring MySQL in basic ways, and whatnot -- that's what the "backend" part is built on, of course. As you say, they need to be able to deploy an app. But their main job is coding, not administration.

So they only need familiarity with deploying, not expertise -- they should be able to get a few servers running for a startup with load balancing. They should not be expected to know the intricacies of MySQL tuning, network security, Linux security, network management, and so on. You're not going to expect a full-stack engineer to know how to use Wireshark. (Gravy if they do, of course.)

I'm just making the point that full stack does NOT include professional-level systems administration or database administration. A full-stack engineer is not a magical go-to guy who knows everything. It's just front-end plus back-end. It's firmly in the realm of coding, not administration.

On the contrary, I would describe it as normal, in the sense that all of these web technologies are just tools and protocols. Any software developer with broad experience ought to be looking at general software architecture principles and programming techniques and testing strategies and all the rest and then choosing whatever tools help them get the result they need.

"Front-end developer" and "back-end developer" always seem like "C programmer" or "Python programmer" to me: they're job titles you use when you don't have enough experience with different tools and techniques yet to drop the qualifiers and just call yourself a web developer or programmer. And those in turn are just titles you use until you realise it's all about building something useful and the job title doesn't actually matter at all except perhaps as a convenient shorthand for initially finding people you can talk with intelligently about getting stuff done.

It's an overloaded term these days, and things like "information architecture" are very different to "software architecture", so I wouldn't put it quite as strongly as you did there.

That said, I agree completely with the point I think you were really making. To me, a software architect is just a senior developer who has particular responsibility for big picture and integration issues, possibly along with other development roles they play. It's the breadth counterpart to a technical lead, who is a senior developer with particular responsibility for specific parts of the system and a deep understanding of those parts.

IME having a software architect becomes useful somewhere around the time that anyone on your team can no longer talk to anyone else just by swivelling their chair and saying hi. They don't have to have the word "architect" in their job title, but somebody had better be making sure that Andrew, Bill, Claire and David are all writing code that's going to fit together in a maintainable way and that the tools are there to build and test the combined code.