Molly Struve (she/her)During the recent Web Application #DevDiscuss, the discussion of Full-Stack developers came up. From there, the discussion delved into the best ways to describe developers and their focus.
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A lot of people felt they had an understanding of the entire stack, but were not extensively skilled across all of it. This led to the coining of the phrase, "Jack of the Stack". Eventually, the conversation turned to describing other developer types. The common concept of the "T" engineer was one of the first to be thrown out.
The conversation was all downhill after that as a group of 4 of us tried to use the alphabet to describe different developers. Here is what Max, Laurie, James, and I came up with!
A - Academic
The developer who insists on CS purity over all else.
B - Bootstrap'er
The developer who insists all sites should just use Bootstrap for the front-end.
C - C Dev
The developer who doesn't want to learn anything else because C is where it all began for them.
D - Dev.to
The developer who posts constantly on DEV.
E - Everything
The developer that has general knowledge in a large number of areas, but also has a few areas where they have more depth of knowledge. This is a more realistic full stack developer definition.
F - F* It
The developer that writes their CSS inline, because F everything!
G - GIFs
The developer that always has a GIF with their PR!
H - Hater
The developer that only talks about how much they hate other programming languages.
I - I can do it all!
The developer ninja who wants to do everything themselves. The mythical 10x'er who probably causes more problems than they solve.
J - Javascript'er
The developer that thinks absolutely everything should be in JavaScript, from the databases to the front-end. Even if it means replacing everything!
K - Kick the Can
The developer that always insist on kicking the can down the road and solving the issue in a later PR.
L - Learner
The developer that rightly knows everything is about learning and is constantly trying to learn everything they can about all the things.
M - Mac
The developer that will not work on anything besides a Mac and they don’t understand why anyone uses Windows. Don’t get them started on Linux.
N - Narrow Minded
The developer with a singular focus on a particular stack to the point of recklessness. They want nothing to do with anything new.
O - O(n)
The developer who is obsessed with all things O(n).
P - Perfection!
The developer that writes the cleanest code, complete with descriptive names, comments, and a fantastic README.
Q - Quirky
The developer that mostly circles around the same tech with one disturbing aberration.
R - Recursion. Recursion. Recursion...
The developer that thinks of the recursive solution to everything.
S - Sassy
The developer that believes EVERYTHING needs a mixin!
T - Topic Expert
The developer that has a lot of general knowledge, but is also an expert on one specific topic.
U - Unicorn
The master full-stack developer, which likely doesn't exist.
V - View Challenged
The developer who decides to throw all the code inline in the view so the HTML is a jumbled mess no one can read.
W - What next?!
The developer that is constantly looking to work with the next shiny, new technology.
X - X marks the spot
The developer who nitpicks the incorrect semantics of every single PR, thinking it must be eXactly on the mark before being merged.
Y - Y isn’t this Accessible?
The developer focused on accessibility. They're so important they should be earlier in the alphabet, and are so essential to each word, you almost think it should be a vowel.
Z - Zzzzzz 😴
The developer that has an obsession with an obscure language that no one knows about, yet they want everyone to learn. It is enough to put you to sleep.
;
The developer who can’t take their mind off of programming, and at the end of the day they forget lists, like sentences, don’t end in semicolons;
SO, which developer can you relate to?! If you can relate to multiple of them, you might just be a "Jack of the Stack!"
BIG Shoutout to my co-authors who helped come up with all these different devs! HIGHLY recommend giving each of them a follow! 🤗
