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by creamyhorror 1189 days ago
It's simple enough: before the rise of front-end frameworks in the 2010s, web developers were indeed more of a single group ("full stack"). But even before the rise of Angular in 2011/12ish, there was already starting to be a specialisation in front-end vs back-end; some devs, I remember, worked almost wholly on the JS UIs of more front-end-heavy websites (they may have been more of web designers previously). Others concerned themselves more with the backend, databases, services, etc. As frontend technologies grew more complex (and mobile became of primary importance), the division grew.

Before Angular and co., "full stack" encompassed using HTML, CSS, and JS. What it can be fairly said to mean nowadays is debatable, but 10+ years ago, doing Rails with a bit of JS would definitely have counted.
1 comments
orange8 1189 days ago
> It's simple enough: before the rise of front-end frameworks in the 2010s, web developers were indeed more of a single group ("full stack").

They did not call themselves "full-stack" though, did they?

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creamyhorror 1188 days ago
The term "full-stack developer" was definitely around before React and Angular.

Sep 2010, a few job ads are looking for "full-stack developers": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659409

Comment from @peteforde on Dec 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2053957

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The key skill that you're looking to pick up is actually what professionals think of as "full stack web development". That is, you should aim to understand lots of things:

- MVC web frameworks like Rails and micro-frameworks like Sinatra

- MySQL and non-relational datastores like MongoDB

- web and proxy servers like thin and nginx

- Redis! it's like a Swiss Army knife... but also Memcached

- jQuery and Haml/Sass

- Backbone and websockets

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Basically, in 2010, if you knew how to work with jQuery, Haml/Sass and maybe Backbone (in addition to backend tech), you could be called "full stack".

And that Sep 2010 Who's Hiring post had many ads looking for front-end (or UI) and back-end engineers, meaning that it was common to be specialised at the time.

Looking back, wow, the experience/knowledge requirements back then were pretty low compared to today...

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