First off, what really makes a developer full stack?

It’s fun and buzzy to say any front end developer is a full stack developer, but being able to deploy a website to Netlify doesn’t make you full stack.

This isn’t meant to be discouraging – just realistically, only having that experience won’t hold up well to that job title in your next interview. While you’re technically creating and deploying your work from start to finish, Netlify, Zeit, and other providers give you the power to do this with their magical tools that take the majority of the stack operations work out of the equation.

That’s not to take away from what we’re all able to accomplish now as front end devs. The growing movement to compile and deploy static websites has just made this process simpler on the later half of the stack with benefits across the board.

Additionally, with the flexibility of tooling options like being able to run JS on a server, our skillsets are able to transfer to more use cases than ever before.

Where we came from

The web development landscape has been changing rapidly. WordPress has been king CMS for a little while now, representing over a third of websites who use a CMS and helping PHP gain popularity. But others worked off of homegrown solutions.

These represented a more traditional web stack like LAMP. In these cases, you had web servers usually running some kind of content management system and a server side language (like PHP) that would interface with the databases and produce the code that would ultimately be delivered to the browser.

On top of that, you might have Javascript making some interactive features with CSS managing the display of the page. Now in some instances, having a managed WordPress server is all you need for certain web hosts. But other larger sites would require another team to manage those services and the deploy pipeline for getting the code out to production.