How to become a full-stack developer in 2023

If you are a newbie in the software development field, you may come across words such as full-stack development and want to know what is a full-stack developer and how to become a full-stack developer. Full-stack development will be one of the top trending jobs in the IT industry in 2023.

In this article, we will talk about full-stack development, the work of a full-stack developer, tools & technologies used, and a complete roadmap of how to become a full-stack developer in 2023.

Let’s dive in.

What is full-stack development?

A website or a web app mainly comprises a front end (client-side) and a back end (server-side).

Front-end is the part of a website that is visible to the user on-screen(Interacts with). The developer who develops the front end of a website is known as a front-end developer.

The back end is the part of t a website that is not visible to the user. For example – when a user submits a form, he can’t see where the information is going and stored.

A full-stack developer does all tasks from making the front-end and back-end of a website to testing code and managing databases, CI / CD, managing the cloud, etc. All this means that the full-stack developer fully controls the whole application.

At first, the developer starts with making the front end of the website using technologies such as Html, CSS, and JavaScript. Then, develop the back-end part of the website using a back-end programming language and store the data sent by the user through a database such as MySql, MongoDB, etc. Then, the code is tested for potential bugs or errors & finally deployed on a server. After the developer deploys the code on a server, it is available for the end users. In case users face any issues or if the website needs any updates (adding a new feature, fixing any problem, etc.). In this case, the developer pushes a new update to the server.

Time required to learn full-stack development

The time required to become a full-stack developer depends on various factors such as your learning approach, self-learning, learn through a guided course. If you are learning it through a guided curriculum, you can become a full-stack developer in around 8-10 months. But it may take you around a year or even more. If you are learning it on your own using free resources such as blogs, articles, or through video tutorials available on youtube. Then, you may find yourself stuck in tutorial hell.

Recommended course to learn full-stack development

One of the best-guided courses to learn full-stack development is Codedamn’s full-stack development path. Using Codedamn, you can learn at your own pace with the best mentors and plenty of good projects are also available on Codedamn. Join Now!

Roadmap of full-stack developer in 2023

When we talk about the roadmap to learning something, there is no single roadmap for learning. Everyone has a different journey and roadmap to learn.

Now, we will talk in detail about the roadmap to learn full-stack development in 2023. We will talk separately about the front-end and back-end parts in our roadmap.

Front-end part

1. Internet basics: Before going to the development side, a full-stack developer must understand the basics of the internet. Some important topics are – Htttp, DNS, domain name, basics, etc. These topics will not take more than a day or two.
2. Html: Html is a markup language. We use it to build the basic building block of a website. For analogy – In the human body, the human skeleton can be considered Html. Some must-learn topics are – all basic tags (body, head, heading, div, span, etc.), table tags, semantic tags, Html forms, and so on. One week is enough to build a good understanding of Html. You can use resources such as codedamn’s Html and CSS fundamentals course.
3. CSS (cascading style sheet): It is a styling language used to style layouts created using Html. From our above analogy of a human body, we can consider CSS as the outer skin of a human body. Some important topics to learn in CSS are – selectors, specificity, box model, grid layout, flexbox layout, etc. You should give yourself at least one month to learn CSS. After that, you should move on to other topics, there is a saying about CSS that you cannot master CSS. A good course for CSS is codedamn’s Html and CSS fundamentals course.
4. Make some projects using Html and CSS. You can also make popular website clones like Netflix, Tesla, etc. It will help you to enhance your knowledge about website layouts. You can also refer to the codedamn’s projects section for some good projects.
5. JavaScript: After learning decent Html and CSS, it’s time to move on to learn Js. Js is a scripting language mainly used to develop the front end of a website. Following our above analogy of the human body, Js adds motion to our human body via logic (nervous system). Js sometimes can be overwhelming for a newbie, due to its weird behavior. One of the most important things to learn in Js is DOM manipulation. Using DOM, Js can access and manipulate the Html elements. Two months is a decent amount of time to get a fair understanding and get used to Js. Mdn Docs is one of the best free resources for learning Js.
6. Now that you have a good knowledge of Html, CSS, and Js. It’s time to make some good Projects using Html, CSS, and vanilla Js to validate your learning. You can again refer to Codedamn’s project section for this.
7. Git: Git is a distributed version control system. Git helps us keep track of our projects & can be used to collaborate with other people. GitHub is a company that provides hosting for our projects. GitHub hosts our projects on a remote server. It will take around 2-3 days to learn its commonly used basics like branches, merging, working with the remote repository, etc.
8. NPM: Another tool frequently used in front-end and back-end development is NPM. While developing, you absolutely cannot build everything from scratch. You have to get help from other people’s work. Developers make their work open source, and combine them in the form of packages. They maintain it & NPM acts as a repository to host the packages. NPM has been the default package manager for Node since the beginning. NPM acts as a command line tool to fetch, install, manage, remove, and update all the packages in your node application. Some of the most popular NPM packages are Lodash, Cloudinary, React, etc.
9. Front-end Libraries and frameworks: libraries and frameworks are used to make our development process easier and faster.
   • For CSS: Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, Bulma, etc. You can choose any of these. Tailwind CSS is the most widely used CSS framework nowadays. It will take you around a week to learn.
   • For Js: Angular, React Js (Js library), Vue.js, Svelte, etc. React.Js is the most widely used Js library for front-end development. One of the main reasons is due to its easier learning curve than Angular. It will take you around a month to learn if you have decent Js knowledge.
10. Now that you have learned all the necessary front-end technologies, you should try to make at least 4 to 5 complex or mid-complex projects using React. It will boost your confidence and you can also showcase them in your resume.

The whole front-end part takes around 5-6 months to complete. There are endless tools and frameworks in the front-end part, you can learn them according to your requirements in the future.

Back-end part

1. Linux: Servers run on an Operating system. The most popular Operating system used on servers is Linux. Linux powers almost 96% of the world’s top one-million servers. There are many Linux distros available. Some of the widely used are- Ubuntu, Cent Os, Debian, etc. You can start with Ubuntu, as it is easy for a beginner to learn. Some of the main topics you should be learning are – the Command line, common Linux commands, shell scripting basics, etc. It will take you around a week or two to learn.
2. Back-end programming language: Back-end is a crucial part of full-stack development. We need a programming language to code our server. There are plenty of options to choose from, for example – Java, JavaScript, Python, C#, Rust, Ruby, etc. You can pick anyone listed. JavaScript could be a viable pick for you, as you studied JavaScript in the front-end part of your full-stack journey. Node.Js is the most popular Js framework used in the back end. Some of the most popular tech stacks use Js as their front-end and back-end programming languages (MERN and MEAN stack).
3. Database: Primary use case of a database is to store data from our website, for example – user login information, form data, etc. We can use, update or manipulate the information stored in the database. Databases are of two types – SQL (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL) or NoSql (Cassandra, MongoDB). MongoDB is used with node.Js because the MongoDB node.Js driver is there, which gives you a good experience. You should know at least one database well.
4. GraphQL: GraphQL is a query language that is used to give users the data they request.
5. TypeScript: Js is a loosely (weakly) typed programming language. It’s hard to find errors because we change variable and object types at runtime. TypeScript adds types on top of Js. Ts helps us to catch bugs & errors early in our code.
6. Testing: Testing is essential to find if our application is working fine. There are many tools out there to do testing. Ex- Selenium, Cypress, Jest, Vitest, etc.
7. Web Security: Web Security is crucial for our website. We should safeguard our website from cyber attacks such as cross-site scripting attacks, SQL injection attacks, etc. We should take necessary precautions to protect our website and user data from cybercriminals.
8. CI/CD: Continuous integration and deployment tools are used to automate our tasks, which enhances our productivity and saves us a lot of time. We use various tools to create a CI/CD pipeline. Some of the popular ones are – GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Circle CI, etc. GitHub is easy for a beginner to learn.
9. Hosting: when we make a website, it resides in our local environment. Only we can use this website. When we deploy our code to a server, it is available for our users to visit. Hosting means renting someone else’s servers for uploading our website online. These servers are computers that reside in a data center, running 24/7/365. Hosting can be of many types like Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Server (VPS), Cloud Hosting, etc. Many companies are providing hosting services. Some well-known hosting companies are AWS (leading cloud hosting provider), Cloudways, Hostinger, Digital Ocean, etc. We can choose to host according to our needs. If we need to cater to only about a hundred visitors on our website, then shared hosting is enough for that website. If we want to serve thousands of visitors on our website, then we can choose a cloud hosting provider for a seamless experience for our visitors.

Conclusion

We have seen in detail full-stack development and its roadmap. Full-stack Development will be one of the most demanding jobs in the upcoming years. Startups love to hire developers who can do both front-end and back-end development single-handedly. Full-stack developers are highly-paid people in the IT industry. According to Glassdoor, the average annual salary of a Full-stack developer in India is around ₹6,72,000. If you want to make your career in the IT industry, you should try full-stack development.

I hope this article helped you to learn about full-stack development.