Grow beyond PHP and become Full stack developer

December 9, 2023

Today, if you do not have digital presence on internet, you just do not exist for the world. You may have very strong product, excellent delivery quality, best of the service; but without effective marketing you just cannot reach out to your customers and grow your business. For doing effective marketing, every business small or large wants to have its digital presence.

On a job portal if one searches for job opportunities for a full-stack developer or a php developer, the response is a big number in the range of 15000 to 17000. And this is no surprise. PHP is one the popular technology for years to create dynamic web applications. However, now-a-days knowing PHP after self-learning or after pursuing just a PHP training course is not good enough.

This digital presence is created through a website, a web application, social media pages like Facebook, a mobile app. Using such mechanisms, one can reach out to global consumers and expand his/her business to reach the global market. As demand for such web applications is on the rise, so is the demand for the web application developers.

Businesses started with putting information about their products and services on the social media and websites. Soon they realized power of digitalization and the website just did not remain a static board of information. Technologies were introduced on web server-side to make the webpages interactive and dynamic. Now these enhanced websites/web applications started attracting customers, proactively providing them information, making quick and seamless sale or purchases possible.  To do all this we need technology which can be used to create such powerful web applications.

HTML, CSS, Java script were the technologies used on web browser side for these powerful web applications. On the server-side technologies like Java, .NET and PHP were popular and are being used till today. One of the reasons why PHP was adopted and loved by many developers was that it was simple, powerful and open source technology. Many developers took PHP training course and developed great web applications.

Then frameworks like Joomla, WordPress were introduced which made the job of web developers quick and easier.

Then came smart phones. When smart phones started dominating the world, development of web applications went through a sea change. Here the challenge was porting the web application’s user interface on devices of multiples sizes and even on desktops. And here Response User Interface and Mobile First strategy was born.

With responsive UI, developer creates only one version of the software or web application for desktop or mobile phones irrespective of their screen/display size. The software automatically adjusts itself to the screen size with no compromise on aesthetics or usability. Some of the key technologies for this are HTML5, CSS3, Angular JS, bootstrap, jQuery etc.

Now any PHP developer who wants to create web application must master these technologies. All what we have discussed so far was related to front-end. Now coming to server-side, node.js is framework that is most popular. If you are an experienced PHP developer or just a fresher completed with PHP training course, it is very essential to start learning node.js and related technologies.

As experienced developer, you know that popular open source relational database is MySQL. With the new discoveries and business scenarios are forcing us to think beyond popular relational way of storing data. No-SQL databases is the new addition and MongoDB is one of the leading NO-SQL databases.

One of the important findings of the stack overflow developer survey 2019 is, more than 50% of respondents identified themselves as a full-stack developer, followed by a frond-end developer and back-end developers

Someone who knows and can develop web applications using all the above technologies is called a full-stack developer. In nutshell, if you want to grab a pie of those 15000+ job opportunities, knowledge of technologies discussed above is critical. Why not start learning the new technologies and expand your career horizon beyond opportunities your PHP training has given you.

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