Being a full-stack developer, How is it?

Now to understand this fully we need to go through my background story as a developer.

It was Dec 2012, and I’ve started as a designer in IT industry, I was not sure about the future and yet not.

Designer :

My job was to do PSD to HTML and yup I’ve started and bond was of 1.5 years and they won’t pay me until they are satisfied that I am good enough to start in the web development field probation period. Luckily, I get a good grasp of those things very quickly and got on board within 3 months.

Wordpress/Magento :

So for almost 6–8 months, I had done designing and then I got the chance to integrate those things in WordPress and I was good in PHP so that was not too hard, due to that I was doing much good progress than senior designers, in that time I also get an increment of 2000/month - (INR), and I was very much happy, but people around me was thinking what an idiot I am, like who gets this much excitement for that.

CorePHP/Frameworks :

Then, after a few months company got an inquiry in core PHP, I still remember that day, the client was asking about minor changes as part of the interview process and finished all the tasks very quickly, the client was impressed and we cracked the deal and as a result, I got the chance to work in that project and that project stayed there for almost 2 years in that time I was working on corePHP, Wordpress custom plugins, Magento theme integration.

After that, I’ve worked with a few more PHP frameworks CakePHP, Laravel , YII , CodeIgniter.

iOS Mobile App :

So the company was working only in web development part only and apart from that other project was outsourced, But one day we got the project for iOS mobile app and I showed my interest that I want to build it and I got that project, now I was not a mobile developer and I was even aware of how to do all sort of things, so as a result I’ve started learning Objective C, at that time swift was not yet launched so if you know a little bit about objective the syntax is very lengthy and to do the small thing you need to write lots of code, there was no storyboard if I remember correctly you need to write all code inside .hor .m file. I’ve successfully managed to finished 2 apps with that soon after that Swift got launched and it was way cleaner than objective c.
I’ve got into this also and finished a project also, I was also exploring realm but didn’t get a chance to implement it.

Angular/NodeJS :

After that back to the web development, as mobile app development was not the company’s strength and we were not getting projects much on that. Then Angular 2 announced, I’ve tried to some angularjs project in my free time but not able to work on any live project, but still I’ve started learning that also and got a good grip on that, and we also get one project in Angular and that’s how I got into JS development, the client wanted the background in NodeJs, but I had lots of things to cover in angular also so new employee got hired fo that one. So as the project goes on and all things were going smoothly with Angular, I’ve started exploring NodeJs also and few parts were tricky but that’s the same as others.

You can’t just do start development from designing, you just can’t switch from web development to mobile app development as easy as it sounds.
It takes time, hours/days/months of effort, and I was giving 14/16 hours of my every day for that. I was able to do that because I was single and living with my friends away from my family, but that’s not the same situation for others and for all life long.

But with all of these things indirectly I was setting up a bad environment for the company’s employees, the expectation was also getting high from other employees too, due to me, and I was not aware of that thing at that time.

So for being a good full stack developer, it takes a lot, you need to keep up with the latest trending features with HTML/CSS, NodeJs ( with some libs express/mongoose/sequlize.. of course ), Angular, or any other frameworks.

and for how long you will be able to do that? If you are fresher or new in this field you will say it like I can do this for my whole life but once you completed your 7–8 years ( atleast in my case) in this field then ask the same question again the answer will be different, I can be wrong :D.

Conclusion :

1. If you can continue without disturbing your work-life balance, you are all good to go. But if it does then you need to decide what is important for you, work or life.
2. Take rest, time to time, there is nothing wrong to do nothing.
3. Truth: Learning is the never-ending process, and you can’t learn all the things, accept it.
4. Instead of trying to do lots of things, focus only on a few things and do that properly.
5. Just keep going, and don’t give up, no matter what!