Wednesday 23 July 2014

The Full Stack Developer

Back in 2010 Carlos Bueno wrote a blog post on The Full Stack Developer and since then there have been various posts that comment on it such as this post and this post which made the full stack developer seem an impossibility.

I’m not sure I buy into this idea of a Full Stack Developer as somebody who can for example throw together a web site using the latest framework/library, work at the TCP protocol level and understand i/o bottlenecks in a database system with any degree of mastery.

Whilst there are some extraordinary individuals out there that can manage this I doubt the majority of developers today can do so.

We as developers have, out of necessity, become specialists in specific areas of computing.

The rate of change, number of languages/tools/frameworks/libraries and depth of understanding required means that in general people simply don’t have the time to be able to keep up with all the changes to all the various areas of computing.

Monday 21 July 2014

Grunt & Gulp – an overview

Furthering my journey into JavaScript up to now I have not had much interaction with JS task/build systems so to remedy that I recently attended a DoLess workshop on Grunt & Gulp to discover what they were all about.

Most often people associate both Grunt & Gulp with building systems but they are not restrict to that and both can form part of the of a front end dev’s day to day development process being able to run tests & reload html when altered, etc