Everyone has a vision of what the future should be for their career. The classic question of “where do you see yourself in 10 years?” is filled by your hopes, dreams, and aspirations. For many developers that dream is to become a Full Stack developer. While that may seem like an excellent goal to work towards, many developers may not realize just what they are getting themselves into.
First and foremost, what is a Full Stack developer expected to do? Once upon a time, knowing how to do Backend and Frontend development was really all you needed to be considered a Full Stack developer. Nowadays, you also need to know about mobile development in order to qualify. If you really want to get into the meat of what it is to be a Full Stack developer, SitePoint has an excellent article titled Being a Full Stack that explains just that.
You may be asking yourself, “Do I qualify as Full Stack?” Let me use myself as an example. I know PHP, HTML, CSS, LESS, Go, Objective-C, Java, Linux System Administration, C++, JavaScript, NodeJS, and Amazon AWS among many other languages and technologies. Does all of that make me Full Stack? Not quite, so let’s throw a few more things in there like Photoshop or Sketch and some familiarity with sales. Now we are getting closer to really being Full Stack.
Being knowledgeable of so many things may sound amazing but with that much information you can find your mind getting a bit cluttered from time to time. Having to know so many languages, you may find yourself sitting down and realizing you do not remember how to get the length of a string in the language you need to use right now. Was it strlen(txt)? Or txt.length()? Maybe txt.size()? This may seem like it would not be too big of an issue but you would be surprised at how it can turn out to be quite the head scratcher.
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If you have gotten this far down the page, I can only assume you still want to be a Full Stack developer. In order to give you a better idea of what you are in for, let’s go over an average day in the life of a Full Stack developer. Specifically, my life. My name is Aleix Ventayol and I am the co-founder of Bugfender, Business Partner and Backend Team Lead at Mobile Jazz, and CTO at myWorkUp. With all three of these roles, my days tend to be kept pretty busy.
As a Full Stack developer, picture your day as this:
Wake up at 7am for a quick breakfast and a quicker shower.
Go into the office and do a little programming. You need to fix a networking SDK written in C++ that has not been working correctly on Windows.
It is starting to get late and guess what? You have a conference next week. Now you need to step away from programming and open up Photoshop so that you can get the conference fliers ready.
Fliers finished? Great, now there is some iOS development to work on. WebRTC needs to be integrated into one of our projects so fire up Xcode and start writing some Objective-C.
The iOS app is looking better, but a co-worker is having trouble with a PHP Yii2 server used by a customer. Better go give them a hand.
Now it is lunch time and you are meeting with a customer. Go get a little face to face time with this client.
Lunch is over and you think the meeting went pretty well. Next up is a sales meeting that needs to be taken care of. You are still out of the office, so now is the optimal time to go do that.
With the sales meeting over, you can get back to the office and finish up those last few changes on the company product landing page. Just make some HTML and CSS tweaks to the WordPress site and your changes and improvements will be ready to go. While you are in there, might as well plan out the next few blog posts for the writers too.
The day is finally over after work with C++, iOS, HTML, and PHP in addition to sales meetings, designs, and planning. Oh but you forgot, there is a customer waiting for some changes to be made to their Android app. Guess you will be working with Android tomorrow. Well, at least you made it through Monday. Only 4 more days of this to go before you get to that sweet, sweet weekend.
So, still think you are ready for life as a Full Stack Developer?
Bugfender
As I’ve mentioned in the article, I’m the Co-Founder of Bugfender, it’s not going to help you to be a Full Stack Developer, but if you are a mobile developer it might help you to improve your apps quality. You can give it a try for FREE and make your app more awesome!
