8 Essential Skills for the Full-stack Developer.

There is a profession in the field of software and web development that is mysterious and incomprehensible, but at the same time alluring and attractive. As you probably already figured out, this is the Full-stack Developer.

To understand what a Full-stack Developer does, you need to understand how web services work today. They consist of two parts:

• Frontend — everything that the user sees on his screen. Site design, buttons, forms, personal account on the site, etc. Front-end developers are involved in the layout and programming of these elements.
• Backend — everything related to the server, storing data on it, and computing on the server. For example, when you enter a search query in Google, the server generates the search results. These are the tasks of backend developers.

The frontend and backend have their own technologies and programming languages that a good specialist must know. If a developer understands both directions and can perform tasks on the Frontend and Backend — he is called a Full-stack Developer. An important characteristic of a Full-stack Developer from an employer’s point of view: such a specialist can close the positions of both front-end and back-end specialists.

So what are the basic knowledge and skills a good Full-stack specialist should have?

Required Full-stack Developer Skills:

• Sociability and self-control. Full-stack developers actively communicate with customers, marketers, other developers, so the ability to communicate and control yourself is very important. It depends, for example, on how efficiently a specialist will collect user requirements or synchronize with his work team.
• Ability to think broadly. You need to see the product from different angles, understand the main requests of users, not forgetting about the key business tasks.
• Willingness to change and challenge. The ability to be flexible will allow you to adapt to the changes and problems that will inevitably occur, as a result of which the development processes in the team will be rebalanced.
• Knowledge of current trends. Understanding how a modern product and interfaces should look.
• Empathy. The ability to feel the emotions of another person and to take his side.
• UI design skills. It’s great if, in addition to the ability to draw interfaces, a Full-stack Developer works with animation — there is an understanding of how to design and implement it correctly.
• Frontend development skills. For a Full-stack, you should at least know basic Front-end technologies, i.e. HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, as well as master the main front-end frameworks and libraries, namely JQuery, LESS, SASS, AngularJS and React.
• Skills for working with data. A Full-stack Developer should be able to create a balanced data model, be familiar with relational and non-relational databases, and be familiar with XML / JSON formats.

Additional knowledge that defines advanced full-stack designers:

• UX testing experience.
• Working with analytics.
• General understanding of backend development.
• Ability to work with a customer and understand his requirements correctly.
• Understanding of marketing (where the digital product is heading right now).
• Skills of a copywriter.
• Understanding the psychology of behavior.

Full-stack Developer tools.

We continue and now is the time to talk about the Full-stack toolkit:

• Figma. The cross-platform online editor that works on Windows, macOS, Linux. The whole team can work in it, including with customers. Free for one user and paid for working with a team.
• Sketch. Paid graphics editor for macOS. The advantage of Sketch is that it has been on the market longer than Figma, so in some cases, there are more opportunities and integrations for it. But if you are a freelancer, working with clients will be tricky as it is not a cross-platform tool.
• Adobe XD (Experience Design). Adobe application for rendering interfaces. The pros and cons are similar to Sketch. XD is noticeably less popular compared to Figma and Sketch. Separately, it should be said about Adobe Photoshop: it is no longer acceptable to do web design using it. This is not a specialized tool, and it costs more than the ones listed above. You can make individual design elements in Photoshop, but not the entire project.
• React, Vue, Angular, Svelte frameworks. A front-end framework is a set of tools that allows you to create templates and make it easier to work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We advise you to try everything a little bit, and choose based on your experience, taking into account the tasks that you want to solve.
• CSS Tailwind CSS framework and others. Recently growing in popularity, Tailwind CSS offers a set of ready-made instructions with which you can quickly create your components and templates. You can write code, style components, and do responsive layouts directly in HTML. This is convenient — no need to come up with the names of properties, which for some turns into a painful process.

Conclusion

As we can conclude from the above, to become a good full-stack developer, you will have to spend a lot of time and effort. However, constant and regular practice allows you to master much more complex disciplines over time. The main thing is to understand where to go, work on key skills, and not stop self-study.