Transcript from the "Why Full Stack" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Jem: And why full stack? I know, I'm really harping on what is full stack, and going on this definition. Because again, if you say you're a full stack engineer, there are people that are like, that's not a real thing. And when I hear full stack, or I get a lot of recruiters reach out and say, hey, I need a full stack engineer.
[00:00:20] What I think is they want a hacker, [LAUGH] but they don't know what they need. So they say, I want someone who's good at everything because we'll figure out what you need when you get here. That's okay too if that's kind of where you wanna go. I started doing full stack.
[00:00:35] I started working in PHP, which PHP you can consider one of the universal languages that you can code in the backend, you can code in the frontend. It's actually not a bad language. It gets a lot of flack, but underrated I think. But you went full stack because at some point in your career, you're gonna see all these things.
[00:00:54] All the concepts we come over today, if you're gonna be an engineer for 10, 15, 20, however long you wanna be an engineer, you're gonna see all these things. And I want you to be familiar with them. And that's really what it's about. And honestly, I'll tell you now, and it's just between us and some random strangers on the Internet, there's a lot of UI engineers.
[00:01:13] UI engineering is probably one of the easy fields to get into, because you can just open up browser and just start coding. And that's good. Everybody should think like an engineer. Well, not everybody, but everybody should understand how the world works, how this technology works. But if you wanna differentiate yourself, understanding full stack, understanding how it all comes together, will make you the better engineer.
[00:01:35] Amongst all the UI engineers in the world, even if you don't do any of the stuff ever again, just knowing makes you a better engineer. That much I can say that. And that's why I like to do this course, because it's just so helpful. It's been so helpful in my career because you never know what you have to do.
[00:01:50] In fact,
>> Jem: At Netflix I used to, well, I still do, but I used to be an IC, so that's individual contributor on the frontend team. I worked on the non-member side. So if you go to netflix.com or on the TV, any of that stuff, that's the domain I worked in.
[00:02:07] So if you're not logged in, that's my team. But what I did was I built a lot of A/B tests. So we test things constantly. But now I moved away from that. Now I work on one of our core teams. So that sits between the UI section. And it sits between kind of the platform layer.
[00:02:27] I work in between there. So primarily on Node, things like that.
>> Jem: I've spent all of last week doing a [LAUGH] database migration, because I chose Redis to build a service and I'm now moving to MySQL. And I've had to hook these all up. I had a problem with the load balancer.
[00:02:42] Some of the security permissions were incorrect. I had to fix the caching. Let me just say, I won't go into details, but I had to do a lot of things that required me to understand exactly what's happening. And if I said, I'm just the UI engineer, that's I'll know what to do, I would not have gotten very far.
[00:02:58] So again, being a full stack engineer and understanding these things is incredibly valuable. And I'm not just saying that because you're sitting there watching this course, I'm saying it because I truly believe that.