What is full stack development?

Before we take any further steps, we first need to answer a simple question; what does it really mean to be a full stack developer? A full stack developer can be defined as a software engineer who has the skill to work on both the frontend and the backend of an application. 

The frontend of a web application is basically anything related to the user interface of the application. For web applications, the technologies that are needed to build the user interface are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In production environments, an application can support different types of frontends, depending on the device by which the user is viewing the web application. For example, a frontend on a mobile smartphone may need different rules to accommodate the limited screen size of the device, compared to a screen size of a large desktop monitor. 

In order to make the application perform the tasks it is expected to do, the backend of a web application consists of all the software layers that need to communicate with the frontend of the application. The backend includes the database layers, the security layer, the user request-handling layer, all the API layers, and more. The backend of a web application can be written in any mature programming language. We will obviously be using Go as our backend language for this book.