Transitioning From the Frontend to Full Stack Web Development

I’ve been learning front-end web development for a while now. My stack now consists of four primary technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React. On top of that, I also work with Sass and Tailwind CSS and, in a previous life, Boostrap.

However, while my front-end development skills can take me far, learning about the backend can help me go even further. That’s why I started learning server-side development using Node and the Express framework. In other words, I’m going full stack.

I started learning Node using Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s NodeJS — The Complete Guide (MVC, REST APIs, GraphQL, Deno).

I haven’t finished yet, but the course is pretty thorough, starting with the basics and building from there. On top of that, I’ve also been reading numerous articles because I learn best by combining videos and articles/books.

Building projects is just as important, so I took a simple 2-hour course on YouTube from JS Mastery that builds an AI image generator web app using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React.js, and Node).

The course has a good overview of creating real-world full-stack apps from scratch to deployment.

With this knowledge, I’m currently building a URL shortener, part of Frontend Mentor challenges. You can check out the challenge on Frontend Mentor and give it a try if you want.

However, since I’m learning full stack, I want to build a backend from scratch and an API that shortens URLs (instead of using available ones).