From Front-End to Full-Stack Engineer

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      1. can you suggest me some international certifications in objective c, cocoa programming and mac os x platform,that can get me a good job ?

  1. Thanks for the interesting article. I haven’t come across the phrase ‘Full Stack Engineering’ before, but it’s a good label for what my role has evolved into over the last 7 years or so.
    I personally think it’s a valuable resource for any development or support team to have in small quantities, especially when a given application requires a particularly systemsy solution. I’ve found that these roles tend to crop up in smaller teams and organisations because larger teams tend towards more layers of management, who tend to prefer individual roles to have obvious labels for their specialisms.
    But who do they turn to when something isn’t working quite right or a project has ground to a halt because the UI team can’t agree an api with the server-side team? That’s where you need somebody to understand what’s going on in the pipeline from the browser’s javascript engine over the network, through the firewalls, bouncing round the presentation and logic tiers and into the storage.
    It also tends to evolve into a more background role, helping answer questions for a specialist who needs to understand something from the other side of the fence, so I wholeheartedly agree with your point about helping UI people with server side API questions, or storage people come up with system load estimates. It also helps to keep the whole system in at least one person’s mind at once, I’m sure we’ve all come across projects with increasingly complex solutions to a problem that could have been simply redefined if only somebody could see the consequences.
    I can’t say what routes are available to get here in every organisation, but I can say what works for my team, quiet curiosity and an aptitude for learning. Generally speaking, computer engineers are easy to get carried away when up to their elbows in something technical, especially when you can add some enthusiasm and interest to what they’re doing.
    When you’ve come up with a question or a requirement that would normally get passed along the stack, follow along with it, ask the person to work through their analysis with you so that you can get to grips with the processes that lead on from your specialism. That way you’ve got the context of your current understanding to pick up the next link in the chain, which is way easier to learn than in the abstract.
    The trick is to get recognised for the value this brings, it can be a demanding and invisible role. Despite needing to keep track of quite a few technical disciplines, I’d say you need to cut 2 parts technical guru with 1 part communication, so that you’re useful to your team. There’s no point diagnosing a spike in disk i/o to a poor use of recursion in javascript if you can’t explain it to your team and teach them why it happened and how to avoid it in the future and then present the problem and the solution to your manager-but-three.

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