> It's simple enough: before the rise of front-end frameworks in the 2010s, web ...

creamyhorror · on March 13, 2023

The term "full-stack developer" was definitely around before React and Angular.

Sep 2010, a few job ads are looking for "full-stack developers": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659409

Comment from @peteforde on Dec 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2053957

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The key skill that you're looking to pick up is actually what professionals think of as "full stack web development". That is, you should aim to understand lots of things:

- MVC web frameworks like Rails and micro-frameworks like Sinatra

- MySQL and non-relational datastores like MongoDB

- web and proxy servers like thin and nginx

- Redis! it's like a Swiss Army knife... but also Memcached

- jQuery and Haml/Sass

- Backbone and websockets

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Basically, in 2010, if you knew how to work with jQuery, Haml/Sass and maybe Backbone (in addition to backend tech), you could be called "full stack".

And that Sep 2010 Who's Hiring post had many ads looking for front-end (or UI) and back-end engineers, meaning that it was common to be specialised at the time.

Looking back, wow, the experience/knowledge requirements back then were pretty low compared to today...