[Bahamut]

I'm not sure how hands on you are being teachinging your friend, but I tried going the full JS stack route with another friend with only 2-3 courses of programming under his belt, and he clearly was struggling due to the complexity of tooling, setting up environments, and generally having a difficult time figuring out the problems & coming up with solutions to them - I am not inexperienced with teaching either, having done it in various capacities (as a paid & unpaid tutor, a lecturer, and discussion section leader).

FWIW, we were working with Sails.js (http://sailsjs.org/), with the intent to getting to use Socket.io, Angular.js, and MongoDB - the setting up of Sails and understanding what things did in Sails ended up being the problem spot.

Instead, I changed my approach to act more like a mentor and have my friend go along the excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/). Things have been much better, although my friend has fallen on his face a few times with Git & SSH in general. I now believe a good intro text is worth far more than picking the right framework(s) to learn.