Build Stuff'16 Lithuania

Once upon a time, when the web was young, phones were dumb and people still thought progressive JPEGs were a pretty neat idea, there were people who called themselves... THE WEBMASTERS. They were brave, they were bold. Armed with a 56k modem and a stack of O'Reilly books, the webmasters were fearless in their ongoing quest, driven by a humble vision - to connect the entire world together. Using Netscape Navigator. Of course, that was a long time ago, and nobody really believes the stories any more. Some say the webmasters are gone. Some say they never existed in the first place - it was just a bunch of marketing people with delusions of grandeur. But a few, a select few, believe they changed. They evolved. They learned new skills, they embraced new technology... and the Legend of the Full Stack Developer was born. The history of software development is rich with tales of extraordinary individuals, whose knowledge of their own systems was absolutely unrivalled. But here in 2016, in a world where distributed systems, machine learning and autoscaling cloud systems are ubiquitous and the average web app uses three JavaScript frameworks, four server-side languages and six different kinds of caching technology, does it really make any sense to talk about full stack developers? Are we clinging to outdated paradigms, nostalgic for the simple days when one person really could know all the answers - or does overspecialisation represent a genuine threat to the established discipline of software development? And if it does - should we be resisting it, or embracing it as a change that's long overdue?