Front vs Back vs Full-Stack Development

While I was in the process of determining which direction I should take in the world of IT, I consulted with my cousin who has been a software developer for over 20 years. I asked him what I should learn to be successful in this extremely broad field. His response was to "learn it all". This statement is obviously impossible to fulfill, but also actually very true. In the world of IT, the more you know, the better. It is obviously important to be extremely good in the area in which you specialize, but it is also important to be familiar with the various disciplines that will impact the work you do.

This brings us to the title of this post...front end vs back end vs full stack development. My response to that comparison would be simply yes. Although a developer may have a particular area in which they excel, they should be functional in all three areas to be the most competitive and valuable in the marketplace.

“Full stack developers work, like back-end devs, on the server side of web programming, but they can also fluently speak the front-end languages that control how content looks on a site’s user-facing side. They’re jacks-of-all-trades.” http://blog.udacity.com/2014/12/front-end-vs-back-end-vs-full-stack-web-developers.html