Cordial greetings.

I hope you are well.

Full stack web development is the combination of two fundamental areas of web development: the Front-end and the Back-end.

- What is the front-end? It is the visual part of the web application that the user has access to and through which he/she interacts with the application. This page in fact would serve as an example of \"front-end\" because here you see represented the data (such as this answer, the likes, etc) and you can also add or edit certain data.

- What is the back-end?: it is the logical part of your application and it is on the server side. From there you authenticate and authorize users, store and retrieve information from databases, send the front-end, etc. As an example, all the data you can see here is retrieved by the server and sent to the front-end, as well as the authentication process so you can use your account, etc.

These two definitions are indeed simplified so I recommend you to check more information on the internet.

Now, how can you get started? There are many technologies you could consider so let's look at the most popular ones or the ones that are gaining popularity and are relevant to today's internet.

- Front-end: HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the basic building blocks of the web. Almost all web page content is developed in these three languages. Nowadays, there is a huge trend in developing Single Page Applications (SPA) to improve the user experience. For these, JavaScript frameworks are usually used: the most popular and demanded is React.js, one that is gaining a lot of notoriety and is the second most popular is Vue.js and one frequently used by large organizations is Angular (for this one you must learn TypeScript).

- Back-end: Node.js is one of the most popular environments at the moment because of its speed, its parallelism and also because it is programmed with JavaScript, plus you can do things that in other environments you couldn't like pre-rendering a SPA. Golang is also a language that is gaining popularity because of its enormous speed, excellent concurrency and that it is compiled. Golang can handle huge amounts of traffic or heavy processes without consuming too many server resources (which saves on overhead). Golang is in fact becoming a favorite language for developing microservices as well.

- Databases: Usually an application needs a database to which the back-end can connect and store or retrieve data. The choice is yours whether to use relational databases (such as SQL databases like PostgreSQL, Db2, MySQL, etc) or non-relational (NoSQL like MongoDB).

- Other knowledge: With the complexity of applications to be resilient and looking for easy scalability other concerns have been born such as:

Architecture: IBM actually has some courses on various architectures [Reactive Architecture Foundations, Reactive Architecture Advanced ] including microservices (widely used in fact) to which it would be good to look at containerization technologies such as Docker.
Cybersecurity: Definitely knowing how to defend and secure a web application is critical since you are dealing with data and serving many users, so acquiring knowledge in the area would be advisable, at least software focused.

As you can see, full stack web development is a huge field, it will take time to learn various technologies but it is definitely a good investment of time and dedication as many companies are demanding web developers and the trend is that users prefer to use web applications rather than having to install a program on their computers. In full stack development it can be the perfect platform to integrate many technologies such as applications that work with artificial intelligence, blockchain, etc.

I am particularly interested in this area, I am still learning several of the technologies I mentioned above as I am not particularly an expert or anything like that, just another learner, so the best way to start is to build small projects and read a lot.

Here's a side note: some companies would prefer to hire specialists for the front-end and others for the back-end. I would think you could start by mastering relevant technologies on the front-end so you can get into the working world faster and on par or then go deeper into the back-end, but the decision is yours of course.

I hope this information has been helpful to you!

Web Development