mark (he/him) is a software engineer, photographer, runner, and other things too sometimes.
I guess I'm full-stack now
Approximately 5 minutes ago I had the epiphany that I'm full-stack now. I've always considered myself a backend guy. But it sort of all at once just dawned on me that I've been doing full-stack for over 3 years now from UIs in React to REST/GraphQL APIs to even some infrastructure.
I'm not really sure how it happened. I suppose I started my career in 2012 as a "Web Developer". Maybe I started as full-stack? After all back then I was writing HTML, CSS, vanilla JS, and PHP. That was full-stack right?
But then in 2013 I shifted to the backend pretty exclusively focusing on REST APIs and then microservices around 2015 (a.k.a. smaller REST APIs). Then in 2019 I did a (very) short stint with gRPC services in Go and Python. None of that was full-stack to be certain. I didn't touch React or Vue or really any JavaScript. I just had clients who consumed my services and many of them sat 10 feet away at a different desk. If you put me in the middle of a React component I would have had to restart my laptop just to escape.
Then in 2020 I joined a startup as the third (fourth kind of?) engineer where I'm still at today. And now I regularly carry out full features from UI to API to infra (if needed). React doesn't scare me, though it used to. I feel fine in it. Like floating in a weird luke warm swimming pool.
Up until 8 minutes ago I considered myself a backend engineer. I'm not really though. Not anymore anyway. I'm a full-stack engineer and it wasn't a choice. It just sort of happened.
So if you need me I'll be over here doing whatever it is I do which is a little bit of everything it turns out.