I'm thinking of changing my professional title to "webmaster". And no, it's not nostalgia
In the early 2000s, being a webmaster meant uploading HTML over FTP, tweaking PHP you barely understood, taming an Apache that broke every Wednesday, and writing the copy yourself. One person handled content, code, server, design. There was no specialisation because there was nothing to specialise in: if you wanted a website, you did everything.
Then came the professionalisation. Frontend dev. Backend dev. DevOps. SRE. UX. Content strategist. Product manager. Each discipline closed in on itself, with its own rituals, stacks and conferences. "Webmaster" came to sound like a guy in sandals running a 90s site with frames and a broken hit counter.
Then, after the mobile, React, Vue... era, the LLMs arrived.
What changed
Today, in an afternoon, I can spin up a Laravel app with auth, write 200 texts in seven languages, build a dashboard, a custom CRM, integrate Stripe and ship it to a VPS. Five years ago that was a four-person team for six weeks. Today it's one person with a decent editor, a handful of well-chosen tools, and judgement.
Judgement is the only thing left you can't delegate. Everything else, syntax, docs, atterns, boilerplate, is now a conversation with the machine.
The twist: this doesn't demand less generalism, it demands more. Someone who only knew CSS or only knew Postgres now falls short, because the AI does that work just as well. Someone who can see the whole system, who decides what to build and what not to build, what architecture holds, what tech debt is acceptable, that person is still indispensable. And honestly, that's the 2000s webmaster with a new superpower.
Webmaster, reloaded
Today's webmaster doesn't just write content. They build features. They design flows. They decide what's cached and what isn't. They pick Livewire over React not for fashion but because they know the team (which is often themselves). They know when a microservice is defensive engineering and when it's architectural masturbation.
And, as before, they write the copy.
The difference with 2002 is order of magnitude. You don't maintain a site, you maintain a system. You don't publish content, you build content pipelines. You don't reply to contact-form emails, you wire a lightweight CRM that classifies intent.
From webmaster to Appmaster and Agentmaster
The same argument extends cleanly to mobile. If you can build a full web system alone, you can build an app. React Native, Flutter, Capacitor, Expo. The stack is mature, the SDKs are documented, and the cognitive switch from webmaster to appmaster is trivial when you understand product logic and client-side state.
Appmaster isn't a different title. It's the same figure on a different surface. And the same would apply to Agentmaster. Today everyone is an AI Consultant without knowing how to type a single line of code. Meanwhile I'm still a developer whos is a able to train models, create agents, RAG architectures, etc.
It's the same figure on a different surfaces.
The SysMaster
Combine both, web and app, and add the cross-cutting layer of architecture, infrastructure and technical judgement, and what you have doesn't fit any classical org chart title. You're not "fullstack", because that already implies a frontend/backend split that doesn't exist in your day. You're not "tech lead", because you don't lead anyone, you lead a system. You're not "technical founder", because there might not be a company.
You're a SysMaster. A master of systems. Someone who designs, builds and maintains a complete piece of software end to end, knowing enough about every layer to make decisions that in a large team would be diluted across six meetings.
It's not a seniority position. It's a way of working. And it's starting to make sense as a professional category precisely now, when the tooling allows it and the market is just discovering it.
Why the title matters
Titles aren't innocent labels. They shape what's expected of you, the processes you're slotted into, the type of problems that find you. Saying "I'm a fullstack developer" puts you on a known track: tickets, sprints, standups, code reviews. Saying "I'm a webmaster" or "sysmaster" pulls you off that track and opens a different conversation: what problem are you solving? Who depends on the outcome? Who owns the system?
That, in the end, is the interesting question.
If you've been at this a while, you probably recognise what I'm describing. Maybe you don't see yourself in any box on today's org chart. Maybe you're doing the job of a whole team from your laptop. Maybe they call you "fullstack" but you know it's something more.
Call it what you want. I'm starting to call it SysMaster.
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