From full stack dev to backend dev and then back.

When you are working on your own as a developer you get exposed to many aspect of the business. You don't really draw border lines. As a web developer you blend in all kind of technology and you consider it all just web development. When you work in a big or established company it is a little different. They don't need full stack developers. They have a person or a group of people that work in just one thing; DBA or Unix for example. If you do this for a while you can become an expert in your field, but lose something in other areas.

After having a regular job for a while in an established company I have started to forget what a full stack developer does. In the beginning I was working on multiple projects and was taking care of backend and frontend, but now I spent months just working on one side of a project. Just recently I have decided to tackle a new project with some friends and I realized there is so much I have forgotten.

Things I used to know and am now relearning.

• I haven't created a deployment procedure from scratch for ages, apparently you need one.

• Setting up permissions on a linux box is fairly easy when you do it regularly, but chown and chmod? After a while it sounds like clown to me.

• You actually do need to create users on for you SQL database. You don't just use the root user.

• I can't believe there was a time I knew how to untar without googling it. Untar? Really thats how it is called?
  

• modrewrite is not enabled by default on an Apache server.

• If you don't use CSS you lose it.

• Iptables rules sounds like gibberish to me.

These are just a few of the things where I was stuck. Luckily the web is full of information to help, sometimes a little too much.

Here is one spot that help me setup all the basics on my Linux box. It will be a long way before I am proficient in being a full stack developer again, but specializing is not suck a bad alternative, cause I can cook up something awesome in no time.