what's up everybody in this Article, I wanted to help a lot of you new developers out there with understanding what is full stack development.
So maybe you want to be a full stack developer maybe you've heard of this term full stack development you're like what the heck is it I've heard it's like front end and back end how much do you know I really just want to cover the basics here so you have a good foundation moving forward so without any further ado let's dive into it.
Now look in order to understand what full stack development is it's really good to have a basic understanding of what a web application is so and when I say a web application what I mean is, let's say you go to youtube.com in your browser many of you probably think of youtube.com and youtube in general as a website right like I put that in my browser that is a website but in truth, something like youtube where there's literally billions of hours of content stored somewhere that's not on your computer obviously that's accessible within milliseconds that's an entire system that you're not seeing so just keeps in mind that when we talk about full stack development we're talking about web applications that are mostly what you interact with on the internet.
So say you go to youtube.com what is full stack development in relation to a web app so web app has two major components to it that you may have heard about right you've heard about the front end so when you go to that link in your browser that is what you're viewing you are viewing the front end which is the user interface right it's also called client-side or client-side code now if you start to learn to code that's where you have learned HTML, CSS, and javascript that's where that comes into play where you know wherever the user interacts with that's the front end now that's nice that's pretty but that's really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of having youtube be functional and having those billions or even probably trillions of hours of video that's available to you and what helps support that is the back end or also what's known as server-side code.
So when you request a video when you clicked on my video here that was the website that you clicked on but the website needed the actual data right the actual bits
the ones and zeros that compromised my video in order to get that it had to go to some remote server in a remote location and say okay I want andy's video give me that information and it's probably a couple gigabit worth of information so it's a lot so it had to be transported over the internet the thing that handled all that
the server is what you call the back end and that encompasses the web server that's serving that information that encompasses the database that houses that video that you were looking for.
So the way I like to explain this to people is there's a front end and there's a back
end now why do we call like what is where does full-stack come in here so full stack developer or full stack development really refers to a developer who is proficient in both the front end and the back end so that means that they can write code for the user interface they can update the look and feel of the application but they also have skills that they could work in the back end so they can work with the API they can update the API they can add endpoints they can change things in the database they have the proficiency and skill anywhere in between those two things they have enough knowledge to make it work now there is no flat definition for what is required as far as a skill set, in fact, the term full stack software developer is very controversial in the field because,
Some people say it's a made-up term it's a buzz word and I'm not going to get into
I believe it's here to stay as far as I can tell but um one last thing I would say about full stack development in case it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense the reason we call it full stack is that if you were to lay out the front and the back end and all the different components that are involved it would look like a stack of pancakes right like each part would sort of it would start at the very top and go to the bottom so at the very top would be like what are runs on your browser so your HTML, CSS, and javascript now that's pretty much all that really I'd say is involved in the front end below that you have the internet so you have to have pretty good knowledge of the internet which means that you have
to know how it works how the front end connects with the back end um and then from there as far as the actual back end goes there are many more pancakes there,
Right, so you've got like your API you've got your web server you've got your database you've got the operating system that the database or the server is running on so somebody who would consider themselves or who is called full stack developer would have proficiency of skills throughout the stack doesn't mean they know everything in an expert level I don't really think that's possible.
