Side Technologies you should learn apart from being a Full Stack Developer

In this short blog post, I will be covering some side technologies that one should learn apart from learning stuff and becoming a full stack Web Developer, which are quite essential and one must know at least the basics of the following side technologies as a Web Developer :

• Version Control

It is very important to learn Version Control to manage the code that you write and the applications that you develop over the course of your journey as a Full Stack Developer.  Git is a popular choice amongst the community and it is the most popular version control system as of now. GitHub is a platform that helps you organize your repositories online and helps you manage your source code.

One must at least know the basic stuff such as creating a repository and pushing your code onto it and how to revert back to some previous state of your code. This gist lists the commands that you need to learn to do the most basic stuff.

• Basic Command Line

Depends on what Operating System you use daily if you are a Linux user, chances are high that you might be familiar with the command line already. Anyways you need to learn the basics of the command line as a developer. You need not be an expert in all the terminal commands but you should be thorough with basic stuff such as changing directories, creating files, creating directories etc. In short, you should not be afraid of using the terminal. Again, chances are high that you might be familiar with the terminal if you use NPM(Node Package Manager) modules more frequently.

• APIS/REST

You should also have basic knowledge of how REST APIs work and how to fetch data from a RESTful API into your application and render it as per your needs. You should learn the difference between the types of requests one can make(GET, POST, PUT etc) and how to use them to your needs. Also, one must check out Postman, a very beneficial tool for testing out and playing around with APIs.

• HTTP/SSL

This is not very important but having the knowledge about HTTP, HTTPS and SSL puts the icing on the cake! Again, you need not be an expert but at least understand what these mean and understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Also when you do need an HTTPS over normal HTTP.

• CSS Preprocessor

I cannot stress how much these can be helpful to speed up your development process and to avoid many headaches which you generally have when using plain CSS. They give you a whole lot of advantages such as using variables in your CSS Code and using mixins(analogous to functions) and what not! So they are definitely worth checking out. Also, they have a high demand in the community these days so they are worth looking. SASS is the most popular in the community right now. LESS is another one to look for!

• Webpack and Babel

Times are changing and so you need to evolve with the modern customs too. Babel is one of the most famous Javascript Compilers which can do a lot of stuff. It can translate the modern ES6 Javascript to simple plain vanilla Javascript, it can compile JSX(React Developers know about this) for you and it can do a lot more. For Bundling all the modules that you use in your project, Webpack is a really nice choice. An alternative to Webpack is Browserify.


So these were some of the tools that you need to learn apart from all the other stuff and languages that you learn on your journey to become a Full Stack Web Developer and these are really demanding in the community these days so at least you should hang around with the basics.

I hope this post was useful for you guys and I will be back with another post soon. So Stay Connected!
Stay Motivated and Keep Coding!