The Life Of A Full Stack Developer
It was 23 years ago when I started coding for a living. It was all about device driver development in C/C++ for manufacturing companies, it was fun until it was not, the fun diminished not in the coding part but the code was stable enough and does not require a maintenance or upgrade! That was the era we refer now as “we don’t build products like we used to anymore” if that rings a bell specially if your grandpa just blew up the toaster that’s what you’re going to hear.
So we moved on, we got online with our noisy US Robotics dial-up, still checking out what’s up at the Bulletin Board System, what’s Twitter? What’s Facebook? I quickly submerged in working the strings of corporate development, headhunters are in the hunt for Visual C++, Visual Basic, MSSQL, Sybase skills, the financial world loves it from investment banking to insurance companies, that sucks, I just want to write games but the pay was good, there was no notion of “full stack” back then, you have to know ActiveX, DCOM, dynamic UI loading at the back of your hand. This was the pre-9/11 era, when the H1-B was given like food stamp somewhere in San Francisco, a lot of my contemporaries grabbed it but that is none of my business my radar was on Web 1.0, the rise of venture capitalism and tech startups.
Open Source and Linux
Post 9/11, anything Microsoft started to bleed money from a lot of businesses. From academics to business, people are starting to look and build for alternatives and it was an opportunity for the people like Linus Torvalds, companies like Sun Microsystems, the W3 Consortium working groups, the Unix and GNu communities to really shine. I don’t want to pay another dime for Windows too. I went to a secret designer leather bag factory and got my first Mandrake Linux CDs, installed it, it was good, but that wasn’t enough, along the way, I need to experience how to compile my own kernel, install applications from source and eventually I ended up being a minimalist Slackware fan.
I learned Java and all other associated technologies that came with different acronyms like SOAP, JAXB, EJB, JMS, ESB, Applets, Swing etc. etc. Sun Microsystems needed to sell the Solaris boxes really hard and Java was a good entry point:
public static void main () {
System.out.println("Hello World");
}At that point the real party was happening, my clamshell Startac was ringing and buzzing from headhunters, freelancers etc. etc. from New York to Singapore, open source was the bomb. HTML, Velocity, the handlers, the taglibs, the servlets were starting to make sense and starting to prove their points just like CORBA, ORB, RPC at the backend. The war with Microsoft was getting intense. Where’s Apple? still in a different planet until now. And we’re deploying with Ants! Ants?!? Yes, RAD has a lot of meanings, Rapid Application Development, Rapid Application Deployment were all the raves back then. The SMS market was booming, the traffic was starting to congest, I have to do performance optimisation, lots of it. We started developing our own in-memory databases, messaging queues and pipelines capable of handling hundred thousand to million transactions per second that the capital markets has never seen before…and they are still mesmerized up to now, and we secretly called it ‘HAGrid’ for High-Availability Grid computing, it is starting to sound so 2003.
Tech Startups and Venture Capital
While some of our compatriots lined up for H1-B to seek greener pasture elsewhere, I stayed a while and watched this red herring (until now) known as the Silicon Valley where money was getting burned like there’s no tomorrow for stupid ideas and startups that does not serve a market or solve a world-changing problem specially in the area of software development with the exception of Amazon, Google, Adobe, Netscape etc. yes, they were the exception, not the rule in Silicon Valley out of a hundred failures that were never published. I know it, I got some pitch decks from efficient compression algorithms(for media streaming) to patent-pending touchscreen prototypes (before there were even touchscreens).
The Rise of HTML, CSS and Javascript
Forget about VBScript, it was a certified piece of junk. I still remember the memes about HTML and Javascript of that homeless guy?
10+ years ago Javascript was just a browser-side scripting tool to make HTML more “dynamic” , there were many attempts to make websites dynamic back then, it’s just a matter of which one you choose to believe and that will be the clear winner (DHTML?) and there were many things to learn back then; Java, XML, Javascipt etc. You have to carefully choose which one will pay the most and not waste your time, unfortunately, HTML and Javascript were not in the shortlist.
And AJAX arrived, and not to forget the much-fanaticized Ruby On Rails, this time the game has changed, the new buzzword; asynchronous, it has turned websites in to real useful applications for the first time, some called it ‘Rich Internet/Web Application” but I want to avoid failed hypes for this writing. Partial loading, fading effects etc. etc. became a reality it was now a designer’s playing field. UI or User Interface matters a lot. The managers, the end-users, the stakeholders doesn’t care about the effort you did at the backend, they care a lot about the UI. The famous 10-minute RoR video on how to build a website was clearly sideswiped by SSJS or known as the server-side Javascript. The year was 2009, the initial release of NodeJS and web development will never be the same again, it was also the rise of MongoDB and other No-SQL databases but that will be for another article.
These tools were not designed initially for enterprise development, it was built to help startups do rapid prototyping, development and deployment. Remember, Silicon Valley is always burning money and you need tools to be able rake lots of it regardless of the outcome whether you succeed on your endeavour or not and now the job market is turning its head to those who know a lot about HTML, CSS, JQuery, NodeJS, Angular, Express, EJS, React anything with ‘JS’ as suffix and at the same time can do backend like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Cloudflare, Cloudinary, that can also manage apps in Heroku, Kubernetes, AWS or whatever and that’s what pays an average of $100/hour now.
23 years, even if you want to retire the demand won’t let you. I guess that’s more than a full stack. Cheers!
