Chapter 16: Best Practices

This chapter will go through some points that you should know if you want to become a full stack developer, or if you want to progress further in your software development career. We will also go over some best practices that are worth keeping in mind when you're working in the field of software development.

In this chapter, we will answer the following questions:

• What kind of technologies should you know?
• Which best practices are important to you?

What to learn next

To become a full stack developer, you have to be able to work with both the backend and the frontend. That sounds like quite a challenging task, but if you focus on the right things and don't try to master everything, it is possible. Nowadays, the technology stack available is huge, and you might often wonder what you should learn next. There are multiple factors that can give you a few hints about where to go next. One way to find out is to browse job opportunities and see which technologies companies are looking for.

There are multiple approaches, and no single right path, when it comes to setting out on learning new technology. Studying a course in web programming is a really popular starting point, and it gives you the basic knowledge to start the learning process. The process is never-ending because technologies are developing and changing all the time.

An understanding of the following technologies is necessary if you want to become a full stack...

Best practices

Software development always involves teamwork, and therefore, it is really important that everyone in a team uses common best practices. Here, we will go through some basic things that you have to take into account. This is not the whole list, but we will try to concentrate on some basic things that you should know.

Coding conventions

Coding conventions are guidelines that describe how the code should be written in a specific programming language. It makes the code more readable and easier to maintain. Naming conventions define how variables, methods, and more should be named. Naming is really important because it helps developers understand the purpose of a certain unit in a program.

The layout convention defines how the structure of the source code should look – for example, indenting and the use of spaces. The commenting convention defines how the source code should be commented on. Quite often, it is good to use some standardized ways of commenting...

Summary

In this book, we covered the technologies that you should be familiar with if you want to become a full stack developer. We started to develop our backend using the Spring Boot framework. We also learned to create the REST API and how to secure your backend. Next, we started to learn the basics of the React frontend library. Then, we developed a frontend to our existing backend using React. We also learned the basics of unit testing and how to deploy your frontend and backend.

Questions

1. Why are coding conventions important?
2. Why should you try to avoid excessive coding?
3. Why are naming conventions important?

Further reading

Packt has other great resources available for learning about full stack development. These are as follows:

• The Complete JavaScript Developer: A Primer to Full Stack JS [Video], by Full Stack Training Limited (https://www.packtpub.com/product/the-complete-javascript-developer-a-primer-to-full-stack-js-video/9781789346022)
• Full Stack Development with JHipster, by Deepu K Sasidharan and Sendil Kumar N (https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/full-stack-development-jhipster)
• Fundamentals of Continuous Delivery Pipeline [Video], by Rafał Leszko (https://www.packtpub.com/networking-and-servers/fundamentals-continuous-delivery-pipeline-video)