DEV Community

Discussion on: Jack of All Trades, or Master of one?

Collapse
 
sam_ferree profile image
Sam Ferree • Edited

I'm in kind of a weird space here...

When I was starting out, I always thought of myself as a backend guy.

I knew C#, Java, Ruby, C/C++, Python, but only enough HTML/CSS and JavaScript to get by.

I learned more frameworks and languages, but still always felt like the backend was where I did my best work. Even so, I was a very, Jack of all Trades guy since I didn't really know any of the languages or frameworks well enough to advance into senior level positions, and be a knowledge source for less experienced engineers. (Unless you wanted a list of all the mistakes you can make when rolling out TODO MVC in a new language/framework, or an exhaustive list of my very strong opinions on them)

I really started to see gains when I committed to being a full stack engineer, but I picked a single stack which was C#, ASP.NET Core, TypeScript, Angular (and Angular is getting dumped if my wish comes true and Blazor catches on)

So I went from focusing on backend to full stack which, but in a very narrow Master of One way.