Edit: Adding some context for those who had missed the current trend. This is a reaction to posts and tweets that state you cannot be a full-stack developer and keep trolling people pretending so.

I agree with the fact you cannot ship high quality software alone. But in my opinion, being a full-stack developer doesn’t mean that.

As a full-stack developer, i am able to create a full application from scratch. Its quality will not be the state of the art but, it is useful for:

building MVPs

kick starting projects

creating proof of concepts

Even in large teams with specialized professionals, what it means is:

having a macro view of projects, people being full stack often have software architect skills and tends to become it as the time goes on

being able to give a hand on each sides of a project, organizations needs flexibility and it is mostly my added value in my current position.

More philosophically, i would say that being a full-stack developer means being good at development (so HTML/CSS is out of scope for me, it’s all about writing code), knowing/learning every patterns how they apply, locally and at scale.

Being used to fail, retry and work on things we are not always confident on. It also means relying on your colleagues when you identify you reach your limit in a particular field.

More importantly, it means not being afraid to apply those skills to either back-end, front-end or whatever, adapting to situations, business requirements.

I have plenty of examples like that:

i mainly write the back-end in my current position, but i generate the client API:

http://insertafter.com/en/blog/considerations_for_generating_api_clients.html

http://insertafter.com/en/blog/considerations_for_generating_api_clients.html I make R&D for code that is both used in front-end/back-end codebase

http://insertafter.com/en/blog/lets_subset_javascript.html

http://insertafter.com/en/blog/lets_subset_javascript.html once, I wanted to build an icon font for a side project. I ended creating the most used font icon project despite the fact I am the worst person to ask for creating an icon ;)

https://github.com/nfroidure/gulp-iconfont

https://github.com/nfroidure/gulp-iconfont i love music but i’m not a musician, I created a wide used Midi parser/player though.

once, i wanted to use a C++ library on the front-end side for a PoC, been featured on HN for it

http://insertafter.com/en/blog/native-node-module.html

I could expand on providing a lot of examples like that. I have a lot of friends in the same situation. Sure, full-stack developers are mostly senior developers, here since the birth of the web, binge reading everything…

They are extremely rare!

But, please, stop negating me!

Once you label me you negate me. Soren Kierkegaard

But if I label myself, it’s OK ;)

Read more