My Development Stack — Technologies I used to develop web

Everybody wants to become a full-stack developer, because then you can develop and manage a web application from A to Z and also this label looks great on profile :P

Well when I started I only knew basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and little bit of PHP and MySQL. But after 4–5 years as a web developer I saw many new technologies and frameworks that became popular and change the perspective of web development.

I always look for technologies that can help me build better web applications with ease. After getting my hands dirty on many libraries, frameworks, I have created my web technology stack for full stack development which I used nowadays in my projects.

I took a course on Coursera of Full Stack Web Development where I started learning Angular 2 for frontend, just in between the course I saw that Angular 4 got introduced by Google and then I got confused. Because Angular 4 is more improved version of Angular but its syntax is very different from the Angular 2 because of TypeScript. So I skipped the Angular and started learning ReactJS. I liked React alot. I know many developers don’t like the JSX syntax in it but I find it very helpful. After React I covered its important modules like React Router, Redux etc. Then a friend told me about Javascript ES6, I heard about it before but didn’t give importance to it but after checking its great functions I dived into it too. So ReactJS with ES6 became my frontend partner. I also took a crash course on HTML5 components and CSS3 to recap my basics.

Now the most important part of a website ‘Backend’ which required a good command on the things you worked on. I find backend development a bit harder cause its the core of a website, if you’re backend sucks then your website sucks!

I worked on PHP with MYSQL database before but after seeing a change in the web development realm that most developers are now shifting toward NodeJS and MongoDB. So I also thought that it will be a good way to start. I learned NodeJS and MongoDB, it took me a time to grasp the concepts of NoSQL databases but I got it afterwards. When I was learning NodeJS I worked on a project which required its backend developed in Python. At first I thought I can’t do it because I just finised NodeJS and now again shifting to Python will not be a good option. But my curiosity made me to take a crash course on Python Flask Web Development and Flask captivated me. With Flask I created a REST API with JWT Authentication in 15 mins then I also added Web-Sockets in it and took me another 15 mins. So it took me only half hour to develop a complete website backend in Python Flask. So I ditched NodeJS and choose Python Flask for my backend development.

Not only this I found a great roadmap to become a full stack web developer on Github from which I also learned many new things. I also shifted my web server to Nginx and left Apache.

Let me make list to conclude everything what I learned and use for web deveopment.

Frontend : React JS, Angular4,HTML5/CSS3 , Javscript with ES6

Backend : Python Flask , PHP (Laravel)

Web Server : Nginx , Apache

Database : AWS RDS , PostgreSQL, MYSQL

Originally published at hasanali.me.