Let’s be realistic here.

Becoming a full-stack developer in less than 3 or 4 months is nearly impossible. Maybe there would be only about 1% of people who would have achieved it but for the rest of 99%, that doesn’t happen.

I quit my job as a Content Writer in 2021 and started preparing for a job in the web development field as I was fascinated by the idea of having a solid working output while writing just a few lines of code.

What did I study?

Before studying, I made it clear in my mind that I don’t need to master anything at that point. I aimed to get a job in the web dev field, just make an entry into it.

Therefore, I studied only that which would require me to build a coding project that I could mention in my resume.

So during my previous job, I started studying web development from scratch during the late hours of the day. I went to the MDN web docs and searched for the same.

There I came to know about the fundamentals of the web and how it works.

Once I got a basic understanding of the web, I dived into actual coding!

Frontend Development

I began devouring the below coding languages: -

• HTML

• CSS

• JavaScript

I thoroughly researched the fundamental languages of the web and came to know about the holy trinity listed above.

HTML took about a couple of days as honestly, there’s not much if we only need to get started.

CSS took a while as styling a web page is a headache (even for senior devs).

Then came JavaScript. One of the most hated and loved languages at the same time. JavaScript is very very vast. It is like jumping into an ocean.

Even now, I study JavaScript occasionally just to get my mind over the concepts of asynchronous nature, promises, async/await and a bunch of other things.

I knew that if I wanted a good chance of getting a job, it would require me to learn a UI framework, i.e. either Angular or React (React is a library, but still).

But it was a tough situation when deciding which one to learn.

I researched a bit and ultimately, selected React as it was built by Facebook and currently, is the most used JavaScript framework, plus it had more jobs.

I focused on getting a good understanding of JavaScript so that I could get started with React.

I studied React and built a personal portfolio project listing my skills, education and projects.

I built a 2nd project related to Movie Database where a user can sign in and sign up (authentication system using Firebase). Moreover, they would be able to browse through multiple lists of movies based on genres.

I listed that project in my resume and applied for an internship position.

And bam!

Soon, I got a call! I sat for the interview round where I was asked some project-related questions and bam!

I got an internship offer!

This process took me about 3 months. I was about to be a Frontend Developer Intern.

But wait, isn’t the post about being a Full Stack Developer? Well yeah, it is. So hold on. But before that:

From where I learned frontend

All of this I learned from the Web Development 2023 bootcamp course by Angela Yu on Udemy.

Apart from it, I also took help from a lot of YouTube channels like Web Dev Simplified, freecodecamp, Kevin Powell (for CSS) and countless others. Literally!

Backend Development

During my 6 month internship, I got to know about Next.js, a full-stack framework. Basically, React with enormous capabilities like page-based routing, server-side coding, and more. I worked extensively on Next.js.

Then there was a time when I was again met with the use of APIs. I had used them on the basic project of the movie database with React, but here, I had to work on Node.js and Express.

Therefore, for the backend, I chose Node.js and watched some videos and did hands-on during my free time. Then I learned Express (Node.js framework) and created APIs from scratch, which was so much fun! Seriously!

In my free time during the internship period, I studied databases and came across MongoDB. There was SQL too but didn’t choose that as it wasn’t used in the organization.

I studied only the basics of MongoDB and used Mongoose, a library for Node.js to manipulate databases and collections.

With these technologies, I made a basic MERN stack project which would be able to simply manipulate the data. Basically, adding and deleting some data.

In the rough span of 7 months, I was basically a Full Stack Developer, who worked on React, Next.js, Node.js and Express.

How can you become one?

If you want to be a full-stack developer, just don’t think too much and start coding! Select a language and write code line by line. Keep writing! Keep writing until you build some projects and get confident in them.

The more you do the actual coding and build projects instead of just reading theory, the more you will learn!

Refer to multiple sources, including videos, articles, blog posts, Stack Overflow, and Chat GPT too!