Questions

I know that term is thrown loosely around, but I want to know how I can become a full stack ruby on rails developer, with additional knowledge on using frameworks such as ember/angular. I also know a bit of photoshop/illustrator and would like to add UI/UX to that. Or am I just kidding my self here? This is what I have figured out from a bit of digging around 1. Learn front end development: HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, Angular, etc. 2. Learn RoR 3. Continue to dig deeper into JS frameworks. 3. Pick up UX & UI principles along with tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator, UXpin and Sketchup. Or should I just replace 1, 2 and 3 with the MEEN stack? (MongoDB, Ember, Express, Node)

It's not something you want to achieve unless your goal is to be the technical cofounder of a startup. If you're the technical cofounder, *you* get to make whatever stack you want! You're the CTO. It's entirely up to you. Woohoo! Now you're the king of the mountain, but how are you going to make money? Technology is a means to an end. Nobody cares how the widget works. We only care about results. If you're caught up in the "programming for the sake of programming" mindset, get a PhD in Computer Science.

If you don't have a strong opinion about what stack to use, I think you're getting ahead of yourself. Maybe talk to your future cofounder about the market adoption of various technology. If you don't have a cofounder yet, maybe poke around Angel List and LinkedIn.

How hard will it be to hire people that know XYZ stack? Choosing unpopular technology will make it harder to scale the business. Assuming you're actually able to create something from scratch that works at all. I hear most computer science graduates can't create anything from scratch. Computer science programs crank out the employees that will work at your startup--after you cash out.

Ultimately, you need to be able to create something from nothing with your chosen language and do everything yourself--and have it all work flawlessly without weird bugs in the code causing intermittent problems. If you can't do that, you're probably barking up the wrong tree. You're only a full-stack developer out of necessity, because you can't afford to hire yet and you don't want to split more equity with a third person.

(As long as we're on the subject, I think an ideal cofounder for a full-stack dev would be someone that knows business law and marketing.)

After your imaginary startup starts growing, you'll want to hand the software over to a software architect, a dev-ops genius, a project manager, people to take it to the next level. Once it's time to hire, the business needs a completely different skillset that the full-stack technical cofounder doesn't have.

Working for any large company, they should have you doing specialized work. There can be only one CTO and it's probably not you. If it's a small company that can't afford to hire a sysadmin and a designer and a developer and a DBA, do you *really* want to do the job of four people?

"Full-stack" is more like a battle scar you get to talk about. Maybe it looks cool, but in retrospect it wasn't something you wanted.


Answered 9 years ago

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