July 20

When people ask me what I am I tell them I’m a “Full Stack Web Developer” which often has the response, “Oh..computers?”

Fair enough…

So to help friends, family and colleagues to understand what I do I put together this little presentation and screen cast.

Essentially what’s different from a full stack web developer and another web developer is a deeper understanding on the underlying web technologies, the ability to run a complete network & hosting structure, and a broader understanding of parallel technologies.

Part 1 - The Hosting System

Every web application and web site has to be come from somewhere, this is the hosting system. A web site could be somewhere local such as the free web hosting your ISP provides, or it could be on a dedicated server you rent somewhere.

The full stack web developer will configure and provide the whole underlying structure for your web application. This will involve sourcing an appropriate server and provision hosting in a data center. It could also be a cloud service such as Amazon Web Services or Google App Engine.

Next comes the installation of the Operating System (OS). This is what makes the computer work in the first place. It coordinates between all the hardware input/output devices and the programs that run on the computer

Finally there are the supporting services. This is not just software installed on the server such as the actual web server program, but also registering and configuring a domain name and it’s associated Domain Name System (DNS), configuring and securing email services (MTA), firewalls, security patches and a whole bunch of other things just to make the server able to work as expected.