According to the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey, full stack development using JavaScript is the most popular developer occupation today. No wonder that a lot of people want to move into full stack developer position. When people speak to us, the most common concern that they have is, I’m not a good programmer, would I be able to become a full stack developer. Our answer to them is a big, YES you can, it requires effort and taking a proper path to becoming a full stack developer. Here are few important things to remember for becoming a full stack javascript developer.

Who is a Full Stack Developer?

A Full-Stack Web Developer is someone who is able to work on both the front-end and back-end of an application. Front-end generally refers to the part of an application the user will see or interact with, and the back-end is the part of the application that handles the logic, database interactions, user authentication, server configuration, etc.

A Full-Stack Developer need not have necessarily mastered all the aspects of front-end or back-end development, but he/she will be able to work comfortably with both front-end and back-end and have a deep understanding of what is going on when building an application.

Here is a list of few of the technologies one need to know to become a Full-Stack Developer

1. HTML & CSS – HTML and CSS are the building blocks of the web. Simply put, HTML allows you to add content and provides structure to a website and CSS is what allows you to style your content.
2. JavaScript – JavaScript language has become the most popular programming language in the last few years, and this popularity only keeps growing. The last few years have seen a lot of new libraries, frameworks, and tools being released. Based on the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming language for Full-Stack, Back-end, and Front-end Development. JavaScript is the only language that can run on both the client-side (browser) and server-side (node js).  Below are some topics you need to understand to become a good full stack developer.
   1. Core Programming using JavaScript
   2. JavaScript in the browser ( DOM, BOM )
   3. Ajax, JSON & API
   4. Async Programming using JavaScript – learning about promises, callbacks, and asyn/await.
   5. Learn to modularize and properly structure the code.
3. Front-End – Knowing at least one popular framework like React or Angular, but most important is to have a deep understanding of the JavaScript language. Knowing how to break the UI into components and understanding client-side routing and making API calls to fetch the data from the server and displaying it to the user becomes an important skill. One great advantage JavaScript has here is that it has 100% market share when it comes to adding behavior on the client side. Being a position to build responsive single page applications becomes crucial.
4. Back-End – When working with front-end the options are minimum and hence knowing what to learn becomes relatively easy compared to learning back-end technologies. The common mechanisms that a back-end language will handle are things like database operation, user authentication, and authorization and most importantly the applications business logic. While learning back-end language you will get different responses when you ask someone which is the best language to learn. You will hear people saying Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript, C#, Ruby, Go etc and the list will go on.
   Important to note here is whichever you decide to learn, learn as much as can and stick to it, the best way to gain a deep understanding of the language is to immediately implement it in some hobby projects that you like. As the article is about Full-Stack JavaScript web developer here is something you will need to learn –
   1. Node.js: Node is a JavaScript environment that can run on top of a server. Which means you don’t need to learn a new language, you can continue to use JavaScript which you had learned previously to build back-end applications. The most popular framework you’d most likely learn to aid you in developing web applications is Express.
5. Database – When building web applications, we would always to store data somewhere and access it later. That is where a database comes in handy. Mongo DB is NoSQL database you would primarily be using while working with Full-Stack JavaScript.
6. HTTP & REST – HTTP is a stateless application protocol, what this means in layman terms is when a client requests for some information from the server, and the next time the client asks for the same or the other information, the server will not remember previously sent data. JavaScript code will make AJAX requests to back-end and data is fetched and served to the user, all this happens via HTTP. Some of the things you will need to be aware of are
   1. Knowing what REST and why is it important.
   2. Following the best practices while building a REST API like – corresponding POST to Create, Get to Read, PATCH to Update and DELETE to Destroy.
7. GIT & Postman -Git is a version control system that allows you are a developer working individually or on a team to keep track of all the changes being made to a codebase. It’s important to know a few important things related to Git so that you understand how to properly get the latest code that you’ve missed, update parts of the code, make fixes, and change other people’s code without breaking things.Developers use Postman to build modern software for the API-first world.