I spent five years trying to learn all these bits I need to build full stack | Hacker News Reader

I spent five years trying to learn all these bits I need to build full stack

21 pointsandrewstuart4 comments

Here's what I know in some depth following a tangible decision five years ago to invest my free time in learning all the technologies I need to build my own applications end to end:

back end programming: Python 3

database: Postgres

Python database: SQLAlchemy, psycopg2

Python web server: Falcon

JavaScript version: ES2015 / ES7 (async & await)

browser front end development: ReactJS (without Redux!)

browser framework: Bootstrap 3

desktop application development: Electron with ReactJS

operating system: Linux

cloud: AWS primarily, have developed with all the major cloud platforms.

cloud services: S3, EC2, SQS, Cognito, SES, Lambda

I am happy to say after 5 years I have now a level of competence sufficient in each of these to be able to assemble the parts into a whole application.

There's a real joy in knowing that for the most part, I have already solved most of the major problems and learning challenges required to get a substantial application built.

Five years in, my productivity is now dramatically higher than when I started on my mission.

Along the way, so many, many other technologies tried and discarded because they didn't appeal to me at a personal level.

Congratulations. It's good to look back and appreciate how far you've come.

What is it that you have built (or plan to build) with these technologies?

What you describe is very similar to my own experience - in terms of the timeframe (previous five years) and technologies. It's been incredibly rewarding and satisfying. About two years in I was able to make an actual living from my new skills and knowledge.

I am about to start a project that will bring together all of the various parts of my preferred 'stack'; Nginx, Django, React, AWS (though looking closely at GCP), Redis, Postgres, etc... I'm also currently trying to evaluate whether graphql would be a worthwhile addition (most likely graphene + apollo).

I've built about seven major projects, most of which are either internal or no longer online.

www.lunikernel.com is freshly complete.

bootrino is complete but not yet released - video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB4oan18MpI

Another one should be complete within a week or so.

I always get asked why I won't call myself full-stack developer when they here what I built in my 10 years as a dev, but it's not just a question of job availability to me.

Yes, I got "forced" to build and deploy services at some jobs, I even had to work with some low level MQTT message queues with IoT devices, but I enjoy it much more to build front-ends and do UX.

Well done. I'm just wondering why React "without Redux!". Is it one of those bits which did not appeal to you on a personal level?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com