If you’ve looked for a software job — or tried to hire software engineers — in the last 5 years you’ve probably used the term full stack to describe yourself or your organization. It basically means a ‘generalist’, but that is just more jargon; what does it mean to be a generalist? What does an engineer with the designation actually need to know? Everything in the realm of software? What kind of software? Are we talking web services, mobile, micro-controllers? No one knows all of that.
Full stack is a reference to a group of components that come together to…
All of my professional experience before coming to Kabbage in 2019 was in full-on DotNet shops; NetFramework /NetCore2, VB/C#, MSSQL Server, Windows VDIs, Bill Gates smiling down from above. I had some forays into AWS DynamoDB and other software stacks for small projects, but the vast majority of my work was in the Windows ecosystem. Arriving at Kabbage, many things were the same or similar — NetCore3, Kubernetes instead of AWS Fargate, Bamboo instead of Jenkins — but the most pervasive difference was that Kabbage mostly uses PostgreSQL to store relational data.
I’m very familiar with MSSQL, and on the…
I gave a talk recently about a small problem we had at Kabbage developing a GraphQL API in .NET Core and how we solved it within the bounds of the framework we were using. The talk went well, a few questions were asked, and afterwards someone came up to me with another question, quite bluntly, “Why use GraphQL at all? Sure, it’s cool, but what problem does it solve that REST doesn’t? Is it worth spending time solving all the new problems it introduces?”
Now, my role is very focused on the ‘how’, and when I started this project, I…
Candice McCollough
Adv. Software Engineer @ Kabbage
