- PPF Points
- 2,888
The whole “full-stack or specialist” thing? I’ve gone back and forth on that more times than I can count. When I first jumped into web dev, I thought being a jack-of-all-trades was the move—you know, hack together some front end, wrangle a database, maybe even poke around with nginx if I was feeling spicy. That was awesome for freelancing and the early startup chaos, honestly. I could just get stuff done, no waiting on anyone. Felt kinda invincible, not gonna lie.
But, yeah, once the projects stopped being tiny weekend hacks and started turning into “oh god there’s a whole team now” monsters, reality hit. Stretching myself across everything meant I was kinda mediocre at a lot, but not actually great at any of it. That’s about when I started obsessing over frontend performance and UX stuff, just diving deep. Turns out, being really damn good at one thing feels pretty nice—plus, people notice.
Full-stack still has its perks, though. If you’re flying solo, or the team’s basically just you and your cat, it’s a lifesaver. You can ship stuff end-to-end, connect the dots, and avoid those “uh, who owns this?” meetings. Communication’s smoother too, since you speak a bit of every dev dialect. But man, tech moves at warp speed—trying to keep up with every new framework or backend flavor? Exhausting. I felt like I was always skimming, never really mastering.
These days, I tell folks: pick a lane, get scary good at it, but keep your T-shaped skills sharp. You don’t wanna be that dev who can’t talk to backend folks without Google Translate. But being known for a specialty? That’s where the magic (and the jobs) are. Anyway, that’s my two cents. Where are you leaning—spread thin, or going deep?
But, yeah, once the projects stopped being tiny weekend hacks and started turning into “oh god there’s a whole team now” monsters, reality hit. Stretching myself across everything meant I was kinda mediocre at a lot, but not actually great at any of it. That’s about when I started obsessing over frontend performance and UX stuff, just diving deep. Turns out, being really damn good at one thing feels pretty nice—plus, people notice.
Full-stack still has its perks, though. If you’re flying solo, or the team’s basically just you and your cat, it’s a lifesaver. You can ship stuff end-to-end, connect the dots, and avoid those “uh, who owns this?” meetings. Communication’s smoother too, since you speak a bit of every dev dialect. But man, tech moves at warp speed—trying to keep up with every new framework or backend flavor? Exhausting. I felt like I was always skimming, never really mastering.
These days, I tell folks: pick a lane, get scary good at it, but keep your T-shaped skills sharp. You don’t wanna be that dev who can’t talk to backend folks without Google Translate. But being known for a specialty? That’s where the magic (and the jobs) are. Anyway, that’s my two cents. Where are you leaning—spread thin, or going deep?
