What is full-stack development? (And should you learn it?)

If you’re interested in software development, you may have heard the term “full-stack development.”

A full-stack developer or engineer is someone trained to work on and build both the front-end (parts visible to the user) and the back-end (data storage and infrastructure) of a website, program, or application.

Becoming a full-stack developer opens doors to challenging and interesting jobs across industries. Companies need employees who can be agile from task to task and project to project.

In this post, we’ll take a look at five main areas of focus for full-stack developers.

What does a full-stack developer do? 

According to Hired’s released Trends in Software Engineer Specializations: 2024 Report, full-stack development is in demand: “...the most dominant specializations have remained steady over the past three years. Back-end Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer, and Front-end Engineer consistently topped the list of most-posted and most-interviewed roles.” 

So, what does a full-stack developer do day-to-day? Here are five areas of focus for full-stack developers on the job: 

1. Web development languages: They use a combination of programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Python, TypeScript, and many others. Full-stack developers don’t need to be fluent in all languages, but they need to hone the ability to learn additional coding languages quickly. 
   
   
2. Web architecture: They need to know how to organize, structure, and configure all the parts of a site, program, or application. Web architecture includes the rules and logic that determine how servers, frameworks, libraries, databases, and more interact with one another.
   
   
3. Software access and tracking: Full-stack development projects can quickly grow in complexity. It’s important to have ways to coordinate people, make source code accessible, track streams of changes, and more. Git and GitHub are widely used full-stack developer software applications that are important to know how to use.
   
   
4. Database storage: Storing and accessing data are at the core of website and mobile app functions. Full-stack developers need to understand different types of databases, including relational storage solutions. 
   
   
5. Design fundamentals: They need to understand business logic and user needs at every step, including a focus on design fundamentals so that they can contribute to creating efficient applications that are easy to use.