Find out how challenging it is to change technologies, what could possibly reconcile frontend and backend and learn how to evolve as a programmer.
Pour some coffee, put on some relaxing music and join us for the twelfth episode of The Hüb, where Igor Đurić shares valuable insights that he’s gained working as a Lead Architect at Zühlke Serbia.
What is a full-stack developer?
This is a topic that is expanding by the day.
When I started programming, a full stack developer meant a person who knows both frontend and backend. That was it, basically. Now a full-stack developer has become a lot more than that.
Apart from frontend and backend, we must also deliver a written code to the client, so that a full stack developer very often covers the DevOps part as well.
How difficult is it to adapt to new technology?
There is a learning curve that can be positioned at different angles depending on the technology.
As someone who worked for 7 years in a product-based company, I may say that when I moved to a service-based company I felt there were big gaps in my knowledge. A service-based company actually looks for a more complete engineer with a broader stack of knowledge because it does not have a product of its own and has to adapt itself to the market very quickly.
It rarely ever happens, but if the entire team were to adopt new technology, they would probably need some time to get used to it. However, after that, I think that a senior programmer in one technology would certainly become a senior programmer in another.
Also, one thing I noticed that strikes me as very interesting is that such a change, in the form of additional motivation for learning, means a lot to people.
Can frontend and backend overcome their differences?
This is something that troubled me as well.
As someone who is primarily a backend programmer and as someone who loves structure in life, I was troubled by the fact that, with frontend, there often isn’t one best way to do something, but it’s more like – if it works, that’s that.
I found a solution to this while working on various projects, and I liked it a lot. This is Typescript. It is very interesting because it allows for object-oriented programming, which we are basically familiar with. It is very easy to use and it is compiled quickly. This looks like some kind of a consensus between frontend and backend, one that is to be strengthened even more in the future.
I was also delighted by the number of frameworks that have been developed in Typescript. Here I could mention NestJS, which I really liked and which I also have the opportunity to use on my current project.
Since what I am referring to is the Node world, I’d also say it has a perfectly developed ecosystem. We could even say that the number of libraries we can use is larger than with Java.
NestJS also makes it possible to connect microservices, whereby scaling is resolved very fast. Its performances per se are good, and adding new microservices – whether adding different microservices or scaling existing ones – is incredibly simple. And best of all it took me only a few hours to start using it.
Advice for all programmers
You need to be open-minded towards everything new, and you shouldn’t be strict about things that do not suit you.
One company that my former company cooperated with had nothing but Perl programmers, who wouldn’t even hear of any other language. Basically, they had one part linked to Linux native commands and they could not find anything that would be anywhere near that in terms of speed. Several years later, they were practically eliminated from the market because of the emergence of containers and Docker, and because of the general development of Spring Boot and Java frameworks which worked much faster and had the possibility of more rapid development.
You should never stick to just one technology or one way of doing things, because technologies develop very rapidly. I think it would be good to know as much as possible and, generally speaking, it would be good to improve one’s knowledge while working on conceptual examples and the things that will remain the same.
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