Defining Part Stack Developer
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On my LinkedIn page, my title is “Part Stack Web Dev.” It came from an article I read or podcast I listened to that I haven’t been able to find again, so I wanted to write a bit about it.
I work at a start up small enough that there are no defined levels or strict job titles, so when I heard about the tongue in cheek “part stack” I decided it would be a fun title to give myself. It’s supposed to be a joke on “Full stack Developer” job titles where they mean “front end web pages/SPA and backend application servers,” which feels like a majority of job postings.
Part Stack
But there’s also a whole stack of computers and services to serve your application, why aren’t those considered part of a full stack engineer’s job? I think of that as an Operations role, so maybe those pieces fall under a “DevOps Engineer” title, which smashes the “developer” and “operations” roles together. Maybe all together that’s a “Full Stack DevOps Engineer”?
Of course, all of these vary by company and HR department. And luckily there’s a job description and interview process where companies and prospective employees can get a better understanding of what a role might entail. We know what all of these titles mean, to a certain degree, so what is a Part Stack Engineer?
I work on the part of the stack that drives your business and serves your customers. I can take a website/web application from Hello World to IPO. I can launch a site if you’ll give me a bare metal server or VPS to deploy it on. I can build an application server capable of scaling to meet your demand, making it secure and observable. I can write HTML/CSS/JS to make your website look and feel like the brand you want to present.
Web Dev
If you noticed that everything on that list is related to the web, you might also remember my job title includes “Web Dev.” I would happily call myself “Web Engineer,” I don’t mean to debate developer vs engineer here. Web Dev just rolls off the tongue better than Web Eng. The “web” part is important to me. We live in a world where you want your data to be accessible on your laptop, and your phone, and maybe a work computer, tablet, etc. It has to live somewhere, so a server (yours or mine) is a good place to live. HTTP/WWW is definitely the dominant paradigm for accessing those kinds of things, everybody has a web browser.
Having a web server also deliver the markup makes the whole thing so much more straightforward to develop; you’ll save 100s of hours a year of developer time. There are similar projects for mobile apps. I can deliver a mobile ready website, but an app is one of my weakest areas. So I stuck the “Web” part in my self-proclaimed title because my works revolves around the web.
Conclusion
The web encompasses a lot of modern consumer computing. Any part of that stack is something I am interested in. At this point, 6 years into my professional programming career, I think I have at least a passing familiarity with most of it. And plenty of experience to plan, build, deploy, and operate a web application. So I call myself a “Part Stack Web Dev,” a title I think encompasses a majority of my experience and interests.
PS, if you think you know where “Part Stack” came from, I’d love to know so I can link to it from here.