There are three segments of web development and design. One is dealing with the user interface or what the customer sees. Front End development is responsible for the crucial elements that make up the presentation of the page. The next is Back End, which handles the processes involved in the web page. It deals with information validation, database management, as well as transactions. As businesses continue to grow, the third segment emerged to accommodate their increasing needs and lucrative goals. Building applications from end-to-end is what makes a full stack developer. It is a more versatile role that is considered the Jack of All Trades.
Web Development: Front-End, Back-End, Full Stack
As the web progresses, it requires an expert that is knowledgeable with comprehensive, cutting-edge technology. There are also complex aspects that need someone with more specialized capabilities.
For this reason, web development divides into three main categories:
Front End Development
Front End Developers manage the customer-facing aspects of a website or applications.
From the key elements, functionalities, placement, themes, and overall user interface, they are responsible.
Simply put, it is the responsibility of front end developers to make informed decisions on creating a web page immersive, engaging, and functional.
Back End Development
On the back end of web development, it involves the supporting aspects of the things that users see on the webpage.
Ultimately, back-end developers are responsible for establishing the foundation of the website or the application.
They manage both the infrastructure and database, which are integral to navigate around webpages seamlessly.
Full Stack Development
Full-stack development is technically a hybrid of front end and back end web development.
Businesses take advantage of their versatility to manage everything in between.
From a web stack, a mobile stack, or a native application stack, these developers are the ones responsible.
What are the responsibilities of a Full Stack Developer?
As previously mentioned, full-stack development involves both ends (front end and back end) of a website or application.
This duality indicates that full-stack web developers or engineers take on projects surrounding databases and building user-facing websites.
There are also times when they need to talk to clients to develop a map of the project phases.
To become an effective, competent full-stack developer, you must have the following skills:
Extensive knowledge in one or more back-end programming languages, especially HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
A growing number of full-stack developers expand their knowledge and even specialize in complex programming languages like Ruby or PHP, or Python.
Since full-stack developers also deal with clients, businesses look for those with experience in project management.
Full-stack must also be proficient in visualization, web design, and user experience development for the front end development skills.
To complete your stack, it is integral that you know the front end and back end development.
Although there is a fine line between these two web development segments, employers would prefer someone who can excel on all the parts of the site.
They utilize their end-to-end web development skills to make the best decisions for the job.
Additionally, full-stack developers are the ones who often oversee the development process. Since they know all-around the process, they can contribute valuable insight into either end.
Contrary to what most people perceive, full-stack developers are not solely responsible for developing the code.
Instead of performing code, they spend most of their time in either the front or back end code of a webpage.
Yet, developers are often experts in coding across the entire stack.
In this way, full-stack developers can dive into either the front end or back end if necessary.
There are full stack developers that formulate the code for an entire website or application.
However, they are often working on a project basis or freelance.
To give you an idea, here are the primary responsibilities of a full stack developer:
Manage the development of a website or application.
Formulate the code and functionalities of the programs.
Troubleshoot issues, and develop testing methods to track the progress of the website or app.
Work with animations, graphics, and design of the website or application.
Coordination with teams in both front-end and back-end development.
Overall, full-stack developers have a knack for developing the infrastructure, database, and user interface of an app or website.
They should be able to leverage cutting edge technology to manage either end of web development.
Proficiency in multiple programming languages like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Angular, Ruby, MySQL, Node, MongoDB, Apache, etc., is also recommended.
How Full Stack Developers Contribute To Businesses
Full-stack development is integral for digital entrepreneurs to progress towards growth.
Developers curate the functionalities establishing the infrastructure, test for glitches across the web, and manage the project in general.
It is an extremely rigorous job that requires them to complete the application from scratch.
Furthermore, they should be able to grasp the different layers involved in web development.
Here are the advantages of full-stack developers to entrepreneurs:
Project Management
Agile Project Management (AgilePM) seeks to bring order to chaotic corporate environments using several tools, techniques, and elements of the project lifecycle. Fundamentally, agile project management aims to deliver maximum value according to specific business priorities in the time and budget allocated. AgilePM is particularly useful in situations where the drive to deliver is greater than the perceived risk.
Full-stack developers can streamline web development, managing every aspect of the project.
It is essential for entrepreneurs that full-stack developers have experience in project management.
The executive and management skills are vital to working on multiple layers of web development.
They can help businesses resolve issues before it arises, considering that they oversee end-to-end development.
It also allowed them to come up with innovative solutions using tools from either the front-end or back-end.
Lastly, their clear understanding of the entirety of web development will enable them to reduce the project’s total costs.
This reduction is helpful for small businesses that have a restricted budget.
Extensive Technical Knowledge
Full-stack developers have vast potential.
They often have extensive technical knowledge that comes in handy throughout the project.
It is in the best interest of digital entrepreneurs to hire full-stack developers that perform better than an individual front-end or back-end developer.
Reduce Operational Costs
Full-stack development deals with all aspects of the project, from the front end to the back end.
It eliminates the need to form a team of experts and further reduces the project’s operational costs.
Full-stack developers can handle end-to-end development single-handedly if needed.
If you have a limited budget, hiring a full-stack developer is a practical solution.
Streamline Web Development
As full-stack developers clearly understand the technologies, tools, and techniques applicable to end-to-end development, they can streamline the project.
Instead of spending time planning the project, teams can start right away.
The time spent collaborating with the team can also be eliminated if you let full-stack developers perform all the work.
Time is precious for any business.
The more time lost when the project gets delayed means more missed opportunities.
Full-stack developers offer feasible solutions in building applications or developing a website.
Instead of relying on a single developer for the front end and back end development, you can save time and money when dealing with a one-person team.
Increase Productivity
Full-stack developers can coordinate across the front end and back end developers to unify their project plan.
They can also work in a collaborative environment overseeing either side of the web development, which increases the team’s productivity.
Understanding a full-stack developer as a profession
Gone are the days where one might have referred to themselves as either a web designer or web developer.
In response to the rapidly increasing complexity of the internet and technology, the more specialized role of a full-stack developer was created.
Full-stack developers are a hybrid of two categories:
Front-end developers – who deal with the visible components of a website, app, or piece of software. Their primary focus is to provide a platform where consumers can interact and receive information.
Back-end developers – more concerned with the creation, recollection, and editing of data through databases such as MySQL. Back end developers are also involved in website server management and increasingly, cloud-based infrastructure.
Full-stack developers, then, are well versed in front and back-end languages and frameworks.
More experienced individuals will also have a solid understanding of the user experience and use their business nous to offer strategies to grow revenue.
What skills does a full-stack developer require?
Soft skills
Problem-solving ability. Working on the back and front-end, the full-stack developer needs to be able to rectify inevitable conflicts such as coding errors. Awareness of security vulnerabilities is also crucial.
Creativity. Full-stack developers must have creativity and style in designing aesthetically pleasing sites and apps.
Patience and attention to detail. Coding is a meticulous and therefore time-intensive process. The best developers are those who keep the bigger picture in mind and see a project through to completion.
Hard skills
Database and web storage. This includes an understanding of how to connect a programming language with a database. Knowledge of caching mechanisms is also beneficial.
Back end language knowledge. JavaScript knowledge is important, but so is familiarity with languages such as PHP and Python.
HTML and CSS. Mastering these front-end technologies is crucial for attractive website content and design.
Familiarity with Git if working in a team to track codebase changes.
An understanding of how HTTP and REST interact to provide seamless communication between the front and back-end.
Benefits of full-stack developers to business
A suitably qualified full-stack developer can perform the roles of two or three individuals.
Provided that they are not overworked, they are ideal for smaller companies with similarly small project budgets.
Full-stack developers also use their vast experience to see the bigger picture.
They can explain or take questions on any aspect of the process because they are involved from start to finish.
This has important benefits for client and stakeholder relations during conferences, conventions, and presentations.
Lastly, full-stack developers can pair a visually appealing website design with a functional and stable back end. Both elements must work in harmony for a business to be competitive.
Key takeaways
A full-stack developer works on both the front-end and back-end of website, app, or software development projects.
A full-stack developer must be creative and possess good attention to detail. They must also have a robust understanding of databases, back-end programming languages, and front-end technologies such as HTML and CSS.
A competent full-stack developer can assume the role of two or three individuals, which has obvious benefits for businesses on a budget. Their expertise is also useful in communicating certain aspects of a project to key stakeholders.
AIOps is the application of artificial intelligence to IT operations. It has become particularly useful for modern IT management in hybridized, distributed, and dynamic environments. AIOps has become a key operational component of modern digital-based organizations, built around software and algorithms.
Agile started as a lightweight development method compared to heavyweight software development, which is the core paradigm of the previous decades of software development. By 2001 the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born as a set of principles that defined the new paradigm for software development as a continuous iteration. This would also influence the way of doing business.
Agile Program Management is a means of managing, planning, and coordinating interrelated work in such a way that value delivery is emphasized for all key stakeholders. Agile Program Management (AgilePgM) is a disciplined yet flexible agile approach to managing transformational change within an organization.
Agile project management (APM) is a strategy that breaks large projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. In the APM methodology, each project is completed in small sections – often referred to as iterations. Each iteration is completed according to its project life cycle, beginning with the initial design and progressing to testing and then quality assurance.
Agile Modeling (AM) is a methodology for modeling and documenting software-based systems. Agile Modeling is critical to the rapid and continuous delivery of software. It is a collection of values, principles, and practices that guide effective, lightweight software modeling.
Agile Business Analysis (AgileBA) is certification in the form of guidance and training for business analysts seeking to work in agile environments. To support this shift, AgileBA also helps the business analyst relate Agile projects to a wider organizational mission or strategy. To ensure that analysts have the necessary skills and expertise, AgileBA certification was developed.
Agile leadership is the embodiment of agile manifesto principles by a manager or management team. Agile leadership impacts two important levels of a business. The structural level defines the roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. The behavioral level describes the actions leaders exhibit to others based on agile principles.
Bimodal Portfolio Management (BimodalPfM) helps an organization manage both agile and traditional portfolios concurrently. Bimodal Portfolio Management – sometimes referred to as bimodal development – was coined by research and advisory company Gartner. The firm argued that many agile organizations still needed to run some aspects of their operations using traditional delivery models.
Business innovation is about creating new opportunities for an organization to reinvent its core offerings, revenue streams, and enhance the value proposition for existing or new customers, thus renewing its whole business model. Business innovation springs by understanding the structure of the market, thus adapting or anticipating those changes.
Business modelinnovation is about increasing the success of an organization with existing products and technologies by crafting a compelling value proposition able to propel a new business model to scale up customers and create a lasting competitive advantage. And it all starts by mastering the key customers.
A consumer brand company like Procter & Gamble (P&G) defines “Constructive Disruption” as: a willingness to change, adapt, and create new trends and technologies that will shape our industry for the future. According to P&G, it moves around four pillars: lean innovation, brand building, supply chain, and digitalization & data analytics.
That is a process that requires a continuous feedback loop to develop a valuable product and build a viable business model. Continuous innovation is a mindset where products and services are designed and delivered to tune them around the customers’ problem and not the technical solution of its founders.
A design sprint is a proven five-day process where critical business questions are answered through speedy design and prototyping, focusing on the end-user. A design sprint starts with a weekly challenge that should finish with a prototype, test at the end, and therefore a lesson learned to be iterated.
Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, defined design thinking as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” Therefore, desirability, feasibility, and viability are balanced to solve critical problems.
DevOps refers to a series of practices performed to perform automated software development processes. It is a conjugation of the term “development” and “operations” to emphasize how functions integrate across IT teams. DevOps strategies promote seamless building, testing, and deployment of products. It aims to bridge a gap between development and operations teams to streamline the development altogether.
Product discovery is a critical part of agile methodologies, as its aim is to ensure that products customers love are built. Product discovery involves learning through a raft of methods, including design thinking, lean start-up, and A/B testing to name a few. Dual Track Agile is an agile methodology containing two separate tracks: the “discovery” track and the “delivery” track.
Feature-Driven Development is a pragmatic software process that is client and architecture-centric. Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is an agile software development model that organizes workflow according to which features need to be developed next.
eXtreme Programming was developed in the late 1990s by Ken Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Ward Cunningham. During this time, the trio was working on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) to help manage the company payroll system. eXtreme Programming (XP) is a software development methodology. It is designed to improve software quality and the ability of software to adapt to changing customer needs.
The ICE Scoring Model is an agile methodology that prioritizes features using data according to three components: impact, confidence, and ease of implementation. The ICE Scoring Model was initially created by author and growth expert Sean Ellis to help companies expand. Today, the model is broadly used to prioritize projects, features, initiatives, and rollouts. It is ideally suited for early-stage product development where there is a continuous flow of ideas and momentum must be maintained.
An innovation funnel is a tool or process ensuring only the best ideas are executed. In a metaphorical sense, the funnel screens innovative ideas for viability so that only the best products, processes, or business models are launched to the market. An innovation funnel provides a framework for the screening and testing of innovative ideas for viability.
According to how well defined is the problem and how well defined the domain, we have four main types of innovations: basic research (problem and domain or not well defined); breakthrough innovation (domain is not well defined, the problem is well defined); sustaining innovation (both problem and domain are well defined); and disruptive innovation (domain is well defined, the problem is not well defined).
The innovation loop is a methodology/framework derived from the Bell Labs, which produced innovation at scale throughout the 20th century. They learned how to leverage a hybrid innovation management model based on science, invention, engineering, and manufacturing at scale. By leveraging individual genius, creativity, and small/large groups.
The Agile methodology has been primarily thought of for software development (and other business disciplines have also adopted it). Lean thinking is a process improvement technique where teams prioritize the value streams to improve it continuously. Both methodologies look at the customer as the key driver to improvement and waste reduction. Both methodologies look at improvement as something continuous.
A startup company is a high-tech business that tries to build a scalable business model in tech-driven industries. A startup company usually follows a lean methodology, where continuous innovation, driven by built-in viral loops is the rule. Thus, driving growth and building network effects as a consequence of this strategy.
Kanban is a lean manufacturing framework first developed by Toyota in the late 1940s. The Kanban framework is a means of visualizing work as it moves through identifying potential bottlenecks. It does that through a process called just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing to optimize engineering processes, speed up manufacturing products, and improve the go-to-market strategy.
RAD was first introduced by author and consultant James Martin in 1991. Martin recognized and then took advantage of the endless malleability of software in designing development models. Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a methodology focusing on delivering rapidly through continuous feedback and frequent iterations.
Scaled Agile Lean Development (ScALeD) helps businesses discover a balanced approach to agile transition and scaling questions. The ScALed approach helps businesses successfully respond to change. Inspired by a combination of lean and agile values, ScALed is practitioner-based and can be completed through various agile frameworks and practices.
The Spotify Model is an autonomous approach to scaling agile, focusing on culture communication, accountability, and quality. The Spotify model was first recognized in 2012 after Henrik Kniberg, and Anders Ivarsson released a white paper detailing how streaming company Spotify approached agility. Therefore, the Spotify model represents an evolution of agile.
As the name suggests, TDD is a test-driven technique for delivering high-quality software rapidly and sustainably. It is an iterative approach based on the idea that a failing test should be written before any code for a feature or function is written. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an approach to software development that relies on very short development cycles.
Timeboxing is a simple yet powerful time-management technique for improving productivity. Timeboxing describes the process of proactively scheduling a block of time to spend on a task in the future. It was first described by author James Martin in a book about agile software development.
Scrum is a methodology co-created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland for effective team collaboration on complex products. Scrum was primarily thought for software development projects to deliver new software capability every 2-4 weeks. It is a sub-group of agile also used in project management to improve startups’ productivity.
Scrumban is a project management framework that is a hybrid of two popular agile methodologies: Scrum and Kanban. Scrumban is a popular approach to helping businesses focus on the right strategic tasks while simultaneously strengthening their processes.
Scrum anti-patterns describe any attractive, easy-to-implement solution that ultimately makes a problem worse. Therefore, these are the practice not to follow to prevent issues from emerging. Some classic examples of scrum anti-patterns comprise absent product owners, pre-assigned tickets (making individuals work in isolation), and discounting retrospectives (where review meetings are not useful to really make improvements).
Scrum at Scale (Scrum@Scale) is a framework that Scrum teams use to address complex problems and deliver high-value products. Scrum at Scale was created through a joint venture between the Scrum Alliance and Scrum Inc. The joint venture was overseen by Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of Scrum and one of the principal authors of the Agile Manifesto.
Stretch objectives describe any task an agile team plans to complete without expressly committing to do so. Teams incorporate stretch objectives during a Sprint or Program Increment (PI) as part of Scaled Agile. They are used when the agile team is unsure of its capacity to attain an objective. Therefore, stretch objectives are instead outcomes that, while extremely desirable, are not the difference between the success or failure of each sprint.
The waterfall model was first described by Herbert D. Benington in 1956 during a presentation about the software used in radar imaging during the Cold War. Since there were no knowledge-based, creative software development strategies at the time, the waterfall method became standard practice. The waterfall model is a linear and sequential project management framework.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
