I recently came across someone who called himself a “full stack” developer. By his definition of the term, I am at best a “full queue” developer. In my entire career, I have never written my own stack implementation. But I recently wrote my own working queue. I didn’t have the heart to break his illusion. I know, I should have educated him and become a better person myself. But I also know, from a lot of my students, that am the worst teacher they ever had to learn from. I don’t disagree with them.
I believe I used to be a full stack developer. That was the time when SSI clustering using openSSI and openMosix were active. Some of these projects haven been abandoned since! Perhaps the term was not even defined at that time. But I could administer a Linux box, set it up from scratch, secure it, tune it, compile and setup my own lamp stack, SSL certificates, implement a custom app over that stack or hack an existing project to fix it for my needs and so on. I did my own database designs and my own UI. Neither were particularly the best, but at least I could.
Today, I don’t think I even know all the pieces that make a cloud stack! Let alone set them up on my own. Part of the reason is that I moved away from that sort of work in pursuit of a different dream. But part of me still longs to get back there. Maybe I will. But the things have changed so much, I have a lot to catch up to get on the edge.