Introduction

What is full stack web development? It’s about the broadest range of capabilities a single developer can master. It means working with frontend technologies, backend systems, databases, and deployment tools. The promise is flexibility and independence. The challenge is depth. Can you truly excel across so many domains, or are you spreading yourself too thin?

My story

Full stack web development was relatively easy when I started building stuff on the internet back in 2007-2011.

The casual flow was like this:

  1. Open Photoshop. Cracked one. Yikes.
  2. Design the website. Or open a .psd file that you received from another designer.
  3. Slice it and export images.
  4. Write HTML, CSS, and jQuery. Yes, you read it right, I learned jQuery before JavaScript.
  5. Client side part is done and the template could be used in any way you want. The easiest way was to change index.html to index.php and you are on the server side already. Connect to database, fetch records, render it. Or you can make a theme for WordPress or OpenCart, or just build a web app using a framework like CodeIgniter.

It was the base of my routine with some improvements on the way until 2015. Then I changed the job where I focused more on building HTTP APIs with all the server side things behind and around that. So the routine described earlier became obsolete.

Anyway, I was still building something that could be called a full stack web application occasionally, especially after I learned Laravel framework. That’s how I got into more advanced client side using libraries like Vue.js and React. The other difference was that I didn’t need to design anything like before. For example, I could just pick Bootstrap, compose the layout using its elements and focus on business logic. Yeah, it looked deadly boring but it worked.

Itching to build web apps again

Late one evening in January 2025, I realized two things:

  1. I want to build web apps again. Not only HTTP APIs for mobile apps.

  2. I am familiar with React and had heard so much about Next.js but honestly had no idea how it works what’s the purpose of it.

So within a few hours, I went through this course: https://nextjs.org/learn

I liked the idea of using JavaScript for everything and avoiding the mental context-switching between JS and PHP. It felt like a recipe for ultimate productivity.

TO BE CONTINUED…