What full stack actually means
tl;dr
Not an expert in everything — nobody is. A generalist who understands how the pieces connect and knows who to ask. And the named stacks are marketing.
Ask a room to define full stack engineer and you get: responsible for the whole data path. Proficient in all aspects of modern computing. Jack of all trades, master of none. A Swiss Army coder. The entire IT department.
Jem's response to "proficient in all of it" is the honest one: that is very close to impossible. Every topic here has enough depth to fill a career, and perhaps a handful of people on earth could claim expertise across all of them.
So the working definition is generalist. Not an expert — someone who understands how the systems fit together, and who knows who to talk to when a real expert is needed.
What's in a stack
Modern computing, at its coarsest, is three things: a UI, a server, and a database. Expand that into a stack and you get:
- A user interface — otherwise what are you building?
- A web server
- A database
- An operating system — always there, usually taken for granted
- An application server, depending on what you're doing
Every one of those exists whether or not you think about it. The point of the course is to stop taking the bottom of that list on faith.
The acronyms mean less than they look like
LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Generally the WordPress stack, and worth saying plainly: it is still by far the most common way a web page gets made, which is easy to forget from inside a React job.
MEAN and MERN swap Mongo, Express, Node and a frontend framework.
Where did the names come from? Marketing, developer advocates, and people who like their tools. The groupings are arbitrary — they don't even cover the same layers as each other. If someone tells you you're not using the right stack, they're telling you about themselves.
What matters is that you're familiar with the one you're in, and that you know what's underneath it.
What this course does
Everything by hand: a terminal, a server you rent and harden yourself, the network it sits on, a web server, an application, a certificate, a database, containers. No platform doing it invisibly.
Your brain will hurt. That's the shape of the material, not a failure of attention.