Core skills for full-stack developers

The word “web developer” means different things, depending on who you ask. We say that web developers are in demand, that they have high salaries, and can deliver huge amounts of value to a business.

For companies looking to solve business problems, this is the most valuable set of skills to provide:

• Relational databases. Designing, creating, manipulating, querying and administering relational databases with systems like PostgreSQL.
• A server-side programming language. Writing computer programs with general-purpose programming languages like Ruby or Python.
• Web browser markup and JavaScript. Writing HTML/CSS to make browsers render web pages as per a pre-defined design. Coding any required interactions with browser JavaScript.

Having these skills separately means you can work on one part of a line-of-business system. When you have these skills together, you can create systems from scatch that allow human beings to manipulate data.

With this skillset, you’re not installing plugins in other systems like wordpress. You’re not delivering a design for a web application without an implementation. You’re not just a “back-end” programmer that doesn’t deliver a UI.

Get these skillls and you can build inventory management systems, financial visualisation platforms, and e-commerce websites. You can organise any information a group of humans trying to achieve a goal need organised.

This is the skill set in high demand. This is the skill set that will net you the high salaries developers talk about achieving†. They’re in demand because taken together, these skills allow you to build systems that deliver massive business value to anyone they’re put to use for.

†: See the #talkpay hashtag for examples.

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