Full-stack web development is one of the fastest growing development careers today. As a matter of truth, many firms have established strong work relationship with full-stack developers both as in-house employees and/or remote freelancers on hire. But what exactly defines the role of a full-stack developer? This is today’s question and we’ll try to answer it as best as we can in this article.
Defining a Full-Stack Developer
Full-stack developers are special developers with advanced technological skills that give them the ability to work on the front-end as well as the back-end development portion of any application. The skills, experience and talent of the developer often determine how well he or she can handle front-end and back-end operations. Nevertheless, every full-stack developer can easily work on both sides.
Full-Stack Development Involves Lots of HTML And CSS
HTML and CSS are the life-line of web development. Since full-stack development involves hand-coding websites, developers in this field have to be proficient in both HTML and CSS. HTML deals with most aspects of the website’s content while CSS styles the website.
JavaScript Is A Major Language in Full-Stack Development
JavaScript has been growing every year and any developer will tell you that it probably has the best libraries, frameworks and tools. Most browser run JavaScript. Node.js can even double-up as a server-side language.
Backend Development
This aspect of full-stack development deals with such issues as database operations, application logic and user authentication. There are various backend languages that full-stack developers use in executing their duties. The commonest languages are Java, SQL, JavaScript, C#, C++, Python, PHP and Ruby/Rails. Developers don’t necessarily have to master every one of these languages. However, whatever language he or she chooses, he or she masters to the fullest.
Database and Web storage in Full-Stack Development
As they built different web applications, full-stack developers often have to store their data. This data has to be stored in a manner that makes it usable and readily available. This is why every full-stack developer is expected to understand the ins and outs of relational data such as SQL and NoSQL database e.g. MongoDB. Developers additionally have to know how to work with in-memory data stores, web storage and scaling databases.
The Application Protocols in Full-Stack Development: HTTP & REST
Communication between serves and their clients depends on HTTP application protocol. HTTP and web applications are closely related to REST and therefore it’s vital that a full-stack developer understand how best to design RESTful API.POST/GET requests. In their work developers also get to utilize a lot of Chrome DevTools.
Building Web Applications and complex web projects
Everything that we’ve discussed this far leads to one thing: that the full-stack developer is creating complex web applications and websites from scratch. Many find this to be one of the difficult aspects of full-stack development.
Here the developer will have to structure the code as well as the data in the databases. There is also a lot of computation that goes into building the architecture of web applications.
Conclusion
Full-stack development is most certainly not easy. Besides everything we’ve discussed, there’s still a lot to do with algorithms, control systems and data structures that are part of everyday life for a full-stack developer. Regardless of how challenging the job appears, it still is quite interesting. The best part is that it’s the beautiful work of full-stack developers that makes our life on the internet pleasant.
