Back and Front

I love being a full-stack developer, and I don’t see myself choosing between front-end or back-end anytime soon.

They are two sides of the same coin. As Masanobu Fukuoka once wrote, an object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing: a specialist lacks awareness when it comes to grasping the entire picture to make the right product decision.

I have nothing against people who specialize in one area or the other. Choosing between back and front is important when you work at a company to prevent unrealistic expectations from your managers: you cannot expect an employee to juggle between different positions and do an above-average job at each one. We only have a few hours in a day to add value, after all.

But I feel like setting up imaginary barriers between the two limits our creative capabilities and the opportunities that follow. A specialist can easily be replaced when the industry isn’t too niche. There are tons of front-end developers and factory workers operating on an assembly line, for example, but few Leonardo Da Vinci.

In fact, experts and masters aren’t specialists. They aren’t just great at a single thing and constantly push their boundaries. David Goggins could be perceived as a fitness specialist at first glance, but he is also a proficient speaker, writer, entrepreneur, Navy SEAL, and a firefighter. Santiago Calatrava is a famous architect, but also an engineer, a painter, and a sculptor.

When the doors are closed, you can’t afford to be happy with being a specialist. You are a human being with a very diverse set of interests and a unique outlook on life: it’s your duty to merge all these specialties together to come up with something that’s yours. Your very own indescribable specialty, if I may say so.

Becoming a generalist is a powerful weapon, because it allows us to judge of a problem in its entirety. We are then free to learn what we lack to solve the problem ourselves, or we can formulate the problematic to a specialist that will give us the keys to its resolution. Free from the chains of a label given to us, we can do anything.