Step by Step Guide to Become a Full-Stack Developer
You’ve decided to take command of a place of your own finally by becoming a full stack developer. Be it a small startup or something you’ve made yourself. Being a full-stack developer and taking command of a place is the best feeling in the world. But it also comes with a lot of responsibilities. Not only responsibilities, but you will also manage all the technical aspects of the whole organization.
Either you or your team of 2-3 members will be responsible for building a website or an app from scratch including the backend and frontend. Generally, you will have to also do UI/UX work a little. Because small startups can’t hire a UI/UX designer upfront. But everyone needs a roadmap. Here we give you a brief insight into what you will experience in your journey of becoming a full-stack developer.
Who is a Full-Stack Developer Exactly?
A common misconception is full-stack developers are very intelligent coders and an average guy can’t be a full stack developer. It’s a total myth. Anyone can become a full-stack developer even if they don’t know coding skills at this present moment. It’s just that you will have to refine your skills in both the fields that are in front-end development and in back-end development too. You need to learn both of the required skills. Generally, full-stack developers stick to one tech stack.
You may ask at this point tech-stack, never heard about it. Tech stack is the technology required to build an application. All the frontend frameworks/languages and backend framework/languages will combine to form a tech stack. Some of the most popular tech stacks are often referred to by their acronyms like MEAN and MERN. Here M stands for MongoDB for database management, E for Express JS, A for AngularJS, R for React.js, and N for Node js. You may have seen a common pattern: most of the underlying frameworks use the javascript language as their main component.
Full-stack developers help organizations save money and they have diverse roles, their scope for growth is not limited. They can easily make it into senior positions because of their skills. In the US, they have an average annual package of more than $100k depending upon their experience.
Step by Step Guide to Become a Full-Stack Developer:
You need to understand your industry before deciding what you want to do after becoming a full-stack developer. You will have to know where you stand and learn the basics first. Then you can choose a tech stack. As we are writing this article keeping in mind that even beginners will be able to understand it. Therefore, let’s start from the basics.
You need to learn HTML first, this is the base of every website or web app. You can then move on to learning CSS which will help you style your elements better while keeping your codebase clean of unnecessary style junk. To simplify the CSS process you may make ready templates to be used in future projects. But there is an even better option using bootstrap or material design and using their simple tags to style your elements instead of writing the CSS by yourself.
After all this content styling. Let’s move on to some logic building that is learning your first programming language. So what should you learn, javascript is the best option to learn if you’re serious about web development. It will open up the doors of multiple frameworks along with backend development. Javascript will help you add dynamicity to your website, using those fancy animations and giving your static content life or bringing them to life as one may say.
Javascript will also help you add some functionality to your client-side code. However, we will not recommend setting up a verification processor or log-in details processor on your client-side due to privacy and security hazards.
You can move on to learning frameworks after this. What framework to choose depends on you. But one of the most beginner-friendly options is learning ReactJS. AngularJS is a bit stricter and in my opinion, not beginner-friendly. After learning ReactJS you would need a state management solution. Don’t worry if you don’t know what state it is in. You will have a better idea of it after getting to know React. The most popular state management system used with React is called Redux.
Congratulations, you have completed the first segment and got to learn about front-end development. Let’s move on to learning the back-end development.
Okay, so what should we do? You may think to start this section. You can choose from hundreds of server-side scripting languages. But to make it easier, as you already know a good bit about JS. You should look forward to learning NodeJS. But learning only vanilla NodeJS won’t help and actually would complicate things for you. We would recommend learning ExpressS after taking some time with NodeJS.
Now after learning all these, you will have a pretty good idea of what you want to do after this. But let us help you, you would need to learn about database managing software to store your data. There are several types of database management services SQL, NoSQL, Graph to name a few. But speaking from experience, the most versatile and beginner-friendly option would be learning NoSQL. Now there are several services under NoSQL. But the most popular one in the industry is MongoDB.
After learning MongoDB, we would like to congratulate you that you have one tech stack under your belt that is MERN.
You would need to learn about package manager and do a bit of DevOps work. There are several responsibilities of a person handling DevOps work. Like infrastructure(NGINX would be a good learning experience), virtualization(Docker), automation(Jenkins).
In this article, we have explored what path a full-stack developer should choose. But trust me once you start learning you would discover hundreds of paths. This path is not ideal for all. This is just to give you a brief overview of what choosing the full stack developer path will offer and what you would need to learn.
Hope you loved our article. We will see you in another article with a new and interesting topic. Before exiting, please let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Content written by Kushal Agrawal
Edited & Managed by Raju Gorla