Has anybody ever mastered either back or front programming though?
If so, then I would really love to meet the front-end coder who has mastered all of the things that the front-end entails - like UX, design, Data Visualizations and programming. Heck, I have yet to meet anybody who has mastered any of these skills.
If nobody is capable of mastering the front or back, then why care about whether or not someone calls themselves full stack?
I like the term "full stack", because it helps select for developers that either enjoy working in the middle, or have strong skills in areas on both sides. The wide world of programmers has tons of devs working independently or in small shops that have to operate on both sides, and I've known plenty of devs that can sling SQL just as well as JS.
If all terms are bad, why not just let devs call themselves whatever term they think fits best?
Beekey Cheung is a software engineer with a large amount of enthusiasm for economics and a passion for education. He loves mentoring other programmers and is currently building an application to te...
Depends on your definition of "mastered". Mine isn't where someone literally knows all there is to know. It's when they are confronted with a problem that they have not encountered before, but have a clear idea of how they want to solve it. I've done enough backend work to be able to make this claim for the vast majority of backend problems. I can't make the same claim for frontend work despite having done my fair share of it. Sure I can search for solutions, but it just takes me an order of magnitude longer than it would when I research solutions for backend problems.
All terms are bad in many ways, but there is a case for standardization. Standards are about making communication easier. Just like we have code standards to make it easier to read each other's code, we also have language standards. While I agree the term "backend developer" can mean all sorts of different things to different people, it would be nice to have terms we can use to summarize what we are capable of rather than listing them all out (e.g. knowing SQL syntax vs creating data models at scale). Then again, the range of technology is so diverse that maybe that just isn't possible.
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Has anybody ever mastered either back or front programming though?
If so, then I would really love to meet the front-end coder who has mastered all of the things that the front-end entails - like UX, design, Data Visualizations and programming. Heck, I have yet to meet anybody who has mastered any of these skills.
If nobody is capable of mastering the front or back, then why care about whether or not someone calls themselves full stack?
I like the term "full stack", because it helps select for developers that either enjoy working in the middle, or have strong skills in areas on both sides. The wide world of programmers has tons of devs working independently or in small shops that have to operate on both sides, and I've known plenty of devs that can sling SQL just as well as JS.
If all terms are bad, why not just let devs call themselves whatever term they think fits best?
Depends on your definition of "mastered". Mine isn't where someone literally knows all there is to know. It's when they are confronted with a problem that they have not encountered before, but have a clear idea of how they want to solve it. I've done enough backend work to be able to make this claim for the vast majority of backend problems. I can't make the same claim for frontend work despite having done my fair share of it. Sure I can search for solutions, but it just takes me an order of magnitude longer than it would when I research solutions for backend problems.
All terms are bad in many ways, but there is a case for standardization. Standards are about making communication easier. Just like we have code standards to make it easier to read each other's code, we also have language standards. While I agree the term "backend developer" can mean all sorts of different things to different people, it would be nice to have terms we can use to summarize what we are capable of rather than listing them all out (e.g. knowing SQL syntax vs creating data models at scale). Then again, the range of technology is so diverse that maybe that just isn't possible.