I am often asked which stack do I work in viz. if I am a frontend developer or backend. I have never been comfortable answering it as we didn’t have such distinctions when I started my career. Back in 2003-04, we were all web developers trying glue stuff together to make websites work. I mostly made websites for small businesses back then and more often than not I was busy trying to get a wordpress or Joomla! site up. Whether it was editing PHP code, HTML, the Javascript files it really didn’t matter, all we wanted was to get the site up!

Over the years, I saw the (web) development ecosystem evolve. As I worked mostly with startups which had small teams, I got to work on the frontend, backend and everything in-between and beyond. Many say code is more art than science so can art be classified into such silos without flame wars 🙈?

I have found code to be a way to express my logic and I think its an artistic skill as other can also do the same but it won’t be similar and yet will work 💯! Doesn’t good art look good to everyone regardless of the artist’s choices?

I find it fun to express my logic on the frontend where you are not sure where and how your code will run. Or while working on backend trying to make things run faster and with less and less latency. Devops work is so challenging when you are starting up a new setup. And how can one not enjoy growth engineering where the rewards of your art are directly correlated with the financial reward. When I work on Spark jobs or some machine learning model I am not sure if I am even on a stack as most things are in a queue here 🤪. And IoT thats a whole different game with bootloaders and firmwares.

So I guess, I am not part of any stack. I am an engineer and I like to solve problems. It is the challenge that attracts me. I would assume this is the case with most engineers.