Why go full-stack in 2023?
This post is not just another take on the never-ending “generalists vs. specialists” debate. We’ll be looking at one specific area – web development. We won’t be talking about mobile apps, machine learning, game development, and whatever else is on the horizon; this post is about web development only. So let’s start with a brief history of how it evolved in the last two decades.
In the early 2000-s, when the web was young, the distinction between frontend and backend developers barely existed. Browsers were not as powerful as today, and websites looked much simpler. Some people specialized in working with HTML/CSS, but that was a bit different – HTML is a markup language, not a programming language. The industry was already pretty active, though. PHP, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, CSS, MySQL, and Postgres were all introduced in 1995-1996, and we still use these technologies today. By 2000, developers had already built enough websites to crash the stock market, even without jQuery! But that was going to change.
The major shift happened somewhere in the 2010-s when frontend frameworks emerged. A remarkable demonstration of what they made possible is Trello, a popular issue tracker released in 2011. It was built on the Backbone.js framework, which was cutting-edge technology at the time. Since Trello used the Single Page Application (SPA) architecture, it didn’t require a full page reload to interact with the server. And it felt fast! Trello was very popular, thanks to its good design and a generous free plan, so many people tried it and are still using it.
