Full Stack Developer's Roadmap 🗺

It's easy to focus on the front end of web development, but what about the back end? Learning about the back end improves your front end skills.

Here are some resources for full stack development that you can save for later.

Table Of Contents

💻 How The Internet Works
🔚 Advanced Front End
🖥 Operating Systems
📕 Languages
🖲 Version Control
📓 Database Concepts
📔 Relational Databases
📗 NoSQL Databases
📨 APIs
♻️ Caching
🔒 Security
🧪 CI/CD
📙 Development Concepts
🏯 Software Architecture
🧊 Containers
📬 Servers
⚖️ Scalablity

How The Internet Works 💻

✨ What happens when you go to google.com?
🎉 Introduction to Networks
💫 Browser Networking
🎊 IP Addressing
⭐️ HTTP/2

Advanced Front End 🔚

✨ HTML & CSS
💫 JavaScript

Operating Systems 🖥

✨ Using the command line
🎉 What is an operating system?
💫 Memory
🎊 Unix Programming
⭐️ Bash-Scripting Guide

Languages 📕

✨ Know PHP
🎉 Learn Ruby
💫 Learn Rust
🎊 Learn Go
⭐️ Know Server-Side JavaScript

Version Control 🖲

✨ A Visual Git Reference
🎉 Visualizing Git Concepts with D3
💫 Github Cheat Sheet
🎊 SVN

Database Concepts 📓

🌟 Object-Relational Mapping
🎉 ACID
💫 N+1 Problem
☄️ Sharding
✨ CAP Theorem
💥 Normalization
🌟 Indexes

Relational Databases 📔

✨ Theory of Relational Databases
🎉 Learn MySQL
💫 Learn PostgreSQL
🎊 Learn MariaDB
🌟 Learn MS SQL

NoSQL Databases 📗

✨ Learning MongoDB
🎉 Learn CouchDB
💫 NoSQL Databases
🎊 Graph Databases

APIs 📨

⭐️ Working with APIs
💥 REST
💡 GraphQL
☄️ JSON-RPC
🎉 HATEOAS

Caching ♻️

✨ HTTP caching
☄️ Redis
⭐️ Memcached
🚀 Service workers

Security 🔒

✨ HTTPS + TLS
🎉 CORS
💫 MD5
🎊 SHA-2
💡 SCrypt
💥 BCrypt
☄️ OWASP

CI/CD 🧪

✨ Testing your code
🎉 Jenkins
💫 TravisCI

Development Concepts 📙

☄️ SOLID
⭐️ KISS
💥 YAGNI
✨ DRY
🎉 Domain-Driven Design
🌟 Test Driven Development

Software Architecture 🏯

💫 Microservices and Service Oriented Architecture
🎊 CQRS
⭐️ Serverless

Containers 🧊

✨ Docker Fundamentals
🎉 Docker Cookbook
💫 Kubernetes Cookbook

Servers 📬

☄️ Nginx Handbook
💡 Apache
💥 Caddy

Scalability ⚖️

💫 Distributed Systems
☄️ System Design Primer
✨ Real-World Maintainable Software
🎉 The 12 Factor App
🌟 Architecting Frontend Projects To Scale

---

This was inspired by a different post. In the other post, I wanted the author to provide resources for the topics they mentioned, so I made my own post. ✨

If you think I missed any resources in this post, comment them below!

Comments

[Anri]

If you are new, and you are coming in here to see this.

I hope this isn't overwhelming to you.

Don't be discourage.

A Full-Stack Developer is more of a very long journey rather than this experience listed out here.

[Rohit Kiran Sawai]

I can't say I'm newbie. I have fundamental knowledge of programming. When I saw above list I came to know I know very less. Till I complete this list, complete framework will change then in what way should I be full stack developer?

[Sumit Singh]

I think it's more about learning the fundamentals of each phase. I think that's what you have also done when started programming. Learning basic fundamentals in any language and applying it in other languages.

[Bhadresh Arya]

That's right. Frameworks will come and go. but the concept stays the same. If the core concept and fundamentals are learnt well then no language or no framework will be hard to understand.

[cucheng]

I agree

[Aashiq Ahmed M]

But not the core na

[Zach Gollwitzer]

Totally agree. The additional point that I would add is that this list appears as separate concepts, but if you're building a production-ready application, you'll learn 80% of this list within the scope of a single project. I don't think they are meant to be learned in isolation (although sometimes this is necessary).

[Ankit Patel]

Agreed!! That's why the roadmap requires achieving a long journey. I guess the author tries to convey!!

[Shaun Collins]

Totally agree!

[Hyper]

just following these things and "diving deep" into this topics will complete that long journey

[⚫️ nothingness negates itself]

• abandon CAP theorem, embrace CALM theorem
• hypermedia-oriented design, richardson maturity design model, hypermedia view-based design, hypermedia modeling
• segmented discourse representation theory (sdrt) model
• odrl model
• wai-aria model
• rail model web.dev/rail/
• prpl pattern web.dev/apply-instant-loading-with...
• xdi/rdf/schema.org/etc.
• core/coap > mqtt
• async REST, ARREST, resthooks.org, github.com/badgateway/ketting/wiki..., etc.
• microservices: use scale cube (microservices.io/articles/scalecub...) and microservice design canvas (dzone.com/articles/streamlined-mic...)
• use YUML (github.com/jaime-olivares/yuml-dia...)

the web fundamentally is a distributed hypermedia application

[Sergiy Yevtushenko]

Suggestion to use microservices is not very good one. This is an expensive step and in most cases organizations are not prepared for them.

[⚫️ nothingness negates itself]

i didn't suggest to use microservices. i saw that someone else mentioned it, and i supplied links to tools and ideas that makes microservices easier to achieve. i listed tools relevant to microservices; i did not suggest that one choose microservices over some other SOA or style irrespective to their problem or economic situation

if anything, a more intuitive reading of my post would be: "IF you use microservices, use scale cube and microservice design canvas", not "HEY USE MICROSERVICE NOW"

notice, all I did was mention the word "microservice" and two things. just because someone puts it on the road map doesn't mean it's a suggested path, but that it is a suggestion of an opportunity to take a path.

this discussion is about what we can learn as developers in order to be competitive and knowledgeable given the problem set, regardless of the budget to achieve it. we're not here to figure out one organization's problem as individual developers. microservices is one of many things we're expected to understand and learn. we're not asking "what is the road map if you have budget X for organization Y", we're just asking what the road map is. you're bringing it a lot of other background or contextual information to a discussion that doesn't depend on it

[ender minyard]

this is so good

[⚫️ nothingness negates itself]

oh you mention docker; use lazydocker. also: percol, ranger, ack, ... all available through homebrew. pryjs is helpful too

[Amit Lamba]

Python 3 would be a fundamental language to learn before even JS, Rust, and Go.

[Ciaran Concannon]

I've only just started learning python for the purposes of backend skills in the near future, glad to see this comment here! 😋

[Jim]

Excellent list. For the benefit of other folks who may be working in a company that uses different technologies for different groups, I recommend adding some information about Subversion (SVN) under Version Control. I was so used to git, but hadn't ever used SVN and it took some time to get out of the Git mindset.

There are two posts on DEV that may be of use :

Starting Out In Development - Subversion

John Van Wagenen ・ Oct 30 '17 ・ 8 min read

#beginners #development

Quick SVN guide for Git users; SVN: The Git Way

Dilip Raj Baral ・ Aug 19 '18 ・ 3 min read

#svn #git #vcs

[ender minyard]

done!

[Paweł Owczarek]

Nice article, thanks :) ... but there is nothing about Frameworks. They are very important. Full-Stack Dev should know Spring Boot (JAVA) and Symfony (PHP) for creating REST APIs and Angular or React for Front End development. There is many topics covered which are less important than frameworks, that needed in work ;-).

[Louis]

I totally get your point, Paweł. From the Employability Aspect, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the latest frameworks and libraries. However - as a learning roadmap - the goal of this article may be to focus on teaching you the underlying concepts and principles modern web apps rely on. I think if you got this essential knowledge and understand what goes on "under the hood", it'll be easy for you to pick up new languages & frameworks.

[Allestri]

Not only Symfony but Slim is also great for creating simple API, as it names suggests, Slim is lightweight.
Design patterns such as MVC or ADR which the creator of Slim embraces ( I personally don't like it tho ) could be a plus.

[Yash_Jaiswal]

I've got the java developer roadmap
Core java(basic concepts, oops, collection framework, stream api)->advance java (servlets,JSP,JDBC)->build tool(maven/gradle)->framework (Spring/hibernate/play/grails etc)

[Melvin Kimathi]

Hey, could you share the Java roadmap

[Amit Lamba]

The article is about fullstack roadmap. A person new to programming would only get tripped up with JS's quirks, if they truly want to learn JS and not a framework or library. Python will be better to learn OO, and with that foundation someone can tackle the idiosyncrasies (prototypal inheritance) of JS. I would never wish for my enemy to come into programming with JS as their first language. Better to get an early win with Python or even Java. It's not a race.

[SavagePixie]

JS first, in my opinion, will lead people new to programming down a whole lot of hurt.

On the other hand, people who start with JavaScript won't try to write JavaScript as if it were another programming language and get frustrated because it doesn't work like their favourite language does. Neither will they learn only one programming paradigm like OOP because it's the only one their language supports and then try to impose it to every other language they learn.

Also, JavaScript is a very nice language to start with because you can very quickly see fancy things happening (like a webpage reacting to user clicks and all that), as opposed to just printing stuff on the console.

[Sandor | tutorialhell.dev]

You need to now what's availble, but focus on Front-end or Backend. Unless you use JavaScript, of course. In this case you can be more or less proficient in the client and server tech.

The best is to learn concepts and patterns. The rest are tools that come and go. If you know a programming language, you will figure our any framework or lib written with it. If you know what databases are, what are the core principles, how they work and what they are for (SQL, NoSQL, Graph), you will figure out MySQL, PostgresQL, Mongo, etc.

With this knowledge you will be always uptodate.

[Andrew Baisden]

Cool list missing the frameworks though like React, Angular and Vue. Also there are much more languages than that some readers might think that you have to learn all of them. When in reality you can specialise with certain technical stacks like React/Node, React/Flask etc... Also you did not mention Python as a language which has more popularity than PHP and Ruby. Choice is good better to cover them all.

[Vom Com]

I didn't see much on a major corporate tech stack: Microsoft-backed .NET frameworks, SQL Server, and their server architecture (IIS).

There's also not much on what I consider the nexus point, common ground, equalizer, or uniter of the front and backend dev: the IDE. And to tie it back to MS, IMO, they provide the 2 best IDEs in the business: Visual Studio and VS Code. The IDE is where I spend 80 percent of my time as a full stack developer, along with browsers (using dev tools for troubleshooting and researching the internet--I consider the browser as part of the Integrated Development Environment, at least in practice).

It's not to be an exhaustive list of specifics, I know, but here's my comments on specific categories I saw missing the Microsoft platforms I'm used to learning about/using as a full stack dev, FWIW. (I also live in an Apache /Angular / PHP / MySQL world, and saw more about those stacks on the list, which is fair).

Good list of concepts and technologies to be aware of in some degree as a FSD.

[Amit Lamba]

You seem to be looking for an argument. I never said don't learn JS. It's the order of learning I'm talking about. JS first, in my opinion, will lead people new to programming down a whole lot of hurt. I think you should re-read what I said without your bias. JS is fantastic and crucial, in time, for a new programmer.

[Pt. Prashant tripathi]

Hi, I'm a newbie I have learned

{
  "web-development":{
    "front-end":["html","css","js(amature)"],
    "back-end":{
      "language":"php",
      "database":"mysql"
    }
  },
  "additional":["git","markdown"]
  }

I have made some small projects in past
What should I learn next

[scroung720]

Thank you for sharing. I think it would be a good idea to add owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/ to the security section.

[ender minyard]

done!

[Shaiju T]

Nice , 😄, Add Java and C# in languages , it is used by big companies and enterprise, both languages have more Job opportunities. Also add Design Patterns in Development Concepts.

[Yash_Jaiswal]

Just How long it will take to complete this journey? I'm in third (pre-final year) of my engineering and I'm about to start my journey in development. I still couldn't decide whether to opt for android development or web development.

[ender minyard]

Learning is the point.

Learning how to learn is the most important skill you can practice. You will never stop learning. There will always be something new. The point is to enjoy the process of learning.