Chris Northwood - The Full Stack Developer: Your Essential Guide to the Everyday Skills Expected of a Modern Full Stack Web Developer

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484241516 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Most of this book was born in Manchester Central Librarys reading room, but it was the team at ApressNancy Chen, Louise Corrigan, and James Markhamwhove transformed it from a long-running side project into something that shipped. Id also like to thank Brandon Scott for acting as technical reviewer, for his suggestions, and for sense-checking me!

The skills and knowledge Ive gained that have qualified me to write this book have come, to differing extents, from everyone Ive ever worked with professionally. Every article Ive read, tweeter Ive followed, and conference speaker Ive watched, combined with those whom Ive paired with, mentored, or had my code reviewed by has contributed to the sum of knowledge thats gone into this book. I want to specifically call out the BBC Knowledge & Learning team, where I grew from a graduate to a senior developer, and the TRIP project team at ThoughtWorks, who gave me the space to grow my technical ability.

There are a number of people I wish to call out whove shaped my worldview into what it is today, which I express through my work. My Auntie Jayne, who as godmother steered my ethical development; Rosie Campbell, who introduced me to intersectionalism; Rebecca Forbes, who kept me sane at the chaotic start of this whole project; Alina Apine, who continues to encourage my radicalism; and, most importantly, my Mum and Dad, without whom I would be nowhere.

About the Author

Chris Northwood

is a senior engineer working for BBC Research & Development, the research arm of the worlds largest public service broadcaster. Chris career began with computer science degrees from the University of York (BEng) and the University of Sheffield (MSc), and he has worked for major organizations including ThoughtWorks and the University of Oxford, as well as many freelance clients. He wrote this book distilling the information he learned over his careerits the book he wishes hed had when he started.

About the Technical Reviewer

Brandon Scott

is a software architect with a passion for improving experiences for both end users and engineers alike. Over his career, Brandon has built his experience across many industries, including finance, entertainment, and education. His primary focuses have been creating distributed systems, developing coaching strategies for engineers, and leading experience design workstreams. Recently he has partnered with Razer Inc., focusing on the design of their SDK products and open source libraries. Brandon has also previously worked with Microsoft on exploring their Microsoft Store capabilities in the education sector.

The electronic computer, the Internet, and the World Wide Web are the greatest inventions of our time, and we are lucky to be working on the crest of the wave that the impact of these inventions is having on society.

Developers have typically worked in technology companies, or inside technology departments of other organizations, but as the earliest developers are now retiring, the latest generation is finding employment in many different areas. The term digital industry is often used to describe more traditional businesses that are waking up to the potential that technologists have paved the way for. For these organizations, technology is not just a cost center and a utility, but a core part of whatever business theyre in, even if the services or products they provide are not technological in nature.

Its with the rise of these digital businesses that the nature of development has changed. If the products and services you provide arent technological, it no longer makes sense to align your development teams around technologies, but to instead have your development and delivery teams working alongside non-techies in these digital businesses. To some, digital may just be a buzzword, but for those who use it, the change it suggests is very real.

For developers working on these digital teams, deep technical knowledge is less important than knowledge of the business and organization, and speed of delivery becomes key. Getting something out there three weeks early can give a digital organization an edge over its competitors, and with communication being one of the greatest overheads in development, it becomes advantageous for a development team to be able to implement all parts of a new feature, or to fix a bug that impacts multiple components, without having to negotiate with another team to do so. The developers working on these teams are sometimes referred to as T-shaped , because their breadth of knowledge is just as important as any depth of technical specialty they may have. Similarly, when software fails, having a team operating the software that is separate from the team that builds it increases the communication overhead. Digital teams eliminate those communication overheads by adopting ways of working and a culture known as DevOps , which blends the lines between development and operational responsibility.