Frontend vs. Backend vs. Fullstack Web Development

See the YouTube version of this here.

When searching for a career path or even trying to figure out what bootcamp to go to or what online course to take, knowing the differences between front, back, and full-stack development is a big piece to the puzzle.

In this post, I’m going to show you specific examples of each and attempt to explain why this topic is so confusing to most people.

Zoom wayyyy out

First, let’s get clear on what type of software engineering we are talking about here. When someone says any of these terms, they are talking specifically about web developers.

What’s a web developer? Well, you might have guessed already, but a web dev is someone who builds the experiences we have when we open up our Google Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, or other web browser. While a web developer might code static websites, in this post, we will be talking about the type of web developer who builds full-featured web applications (think Facebook, YouTube, or Reddit).

This gets confusing quickly though because there are many tangential functions involved in creating websites and web apps. For example, if you want to deploy your web app to a specific domain such as www.myawesomeapp.com, you will need to briefly dip your toes…