Full-Stack Developer
You build the screen and the thing behind it, and you own the whole feature.
No degree needed Hard, mostly through breadth rather than depth.
Can I actually do this?
Very open without a degree — this is the classic self-taught route, and the free curriculum below runs from nothing to employable. The honest catch is that 'full-stack' at a junior level usually means being adequate at both halves, and you will be compared against specialists in interviews for either one. Deployed projects you can hand someone a link to are what close that gap.
Who it suits. People who want to finish things end to end rather than hand work over a wall.
Runway. A year or more if you are starting cold. You are learning two jobs.
Coming from either half? You are most of the way there. Build one complete thing that includes the half you do not know yet. Frontend Developer Backend Developer
Also advertised as
The route
Four stations, in order. Each one is a thing you finish before the next matters.
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Station one
Learn it free
Only the best few, deliberately. Every one of these is free to use — the pill on each card says exactly what is and isn't free.
The Odin Project — Full Stack JavaScript
Free to learn · no certificate
A complete free curriculum from first principles to deployed applications, project-driven rather than video-driven. Free, open source, no certificate.
Verified 2026-07-27
MDN — Learn web development
Free to learn · no certificate
The reference you will keep open for years. Use it alongside a curriculum, not instead of one.
Verified 2026-07-27
PostgreSQL — the official tutorial
Free to learn · no certificate
Full-stack means owning the data too. Learning SQL properly against a real database is what separates this from front-end with extra steps.
Verified 2026-07-27
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Station two
Attest strategically
Nothing worth buying. Web development hires on what you have built and deployed. There is a large market in paid bootcamps and certificates for exactly this role; the free curriculum above covers the same ground, and no employer will ask which you used.
Nothing here is worth paying for
No credential needed
Nothing worth buying. Web development hires on what you have built and deployed. There is a large market in paid bootcamps and certificates for exactly this role; the free curriculum above covers the same ground, and no employer will ask which you used.
Checked 2026-07-27
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Station three
Prove it
A certificate says you passed a test. These say you can do the job.
One deployed application with real users
Even five users. Something with accounts, a database and a live URL. One of these outweighs ten tutorials.
A feature built end to end
Show the same change through the interface, the API and the schema. This is the actual job.
Something you had to fix in production
Write up what broke and how you found it. Everyone builds; fewer can debug.
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Station four
Get hired
Search these exact titles
Who hires for this. Startups and small teams above all, where one person owning a whole feature is the point. Also agencies and internal tools teams.
A live URL is checkable in one click, which is why deployed work carries further here than anywhere else in this directory. That is our reasoning about what is inspectable, not a hiring statistic we have verified.
On salaryWe don't publish salary estimates. Numbers copied between blogs drift from reality, and a wrong number costs you real negotiating power. When we have a verified public source, it goes here with its date.
Where this route continues
- DevOps Engineer — owning deployment is the next natural step
- Backend Developer — specialising down
- Frontend Developer — sideways move
- Backend Developer — sideways move
This page last verified 2026-07-27 · How we verify
Odin Project full-stack path, MDN and the PostgreSQL tutorial fetched and READ 2026-07-27.