97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know

Chapter 28. “Full-Stack Developer” Is a Mindset

Maciej Walkowiak

In 2007—the year I started working my first job as a Java developer—the spectrum of technologies involved in day-to-day web development was quite narrow. Relational databases were in most cases the only type of database a developer needed to know. Frontend development was limited to HTML and CSS, spiced with a bit of JavaScript. Java development itself meant primarily working with Hibernate plus either Spring or Struts. This set of technologies covered almost everything necessary for building applications at that time. Most Java developers were actually full-stack developers, though that term had not yet been coined.

Things have changed significantly since 2007. We started building more and more complex user interfaces and handling this complexity with advanced JavaScript frameworks. We now use NoSQL databases, and almost every one of them is very different from the others. We stream data with Kafka, message with RabbitMQ, and do a lot more. In many cases, we also are responsible for setting up or maintaining the infrastructure with Terraform or CloudFormation, and we use or even configure Kubernetes clusters. Overall complexity has grown to the point that we have separate positions for frontend developer, backend developer, and DevOps engineer. Is it still possible to be a full-stack developer? That depends on how ...