Engineering video
1:01 · 5 August 2025
A frontend engineer can learn full-stack skills by changing their mindset to a software engineer specializing in client-side applications and applying existing knowledge—such as state management in databases and program memory—to the backend.
Hear it at 0:00 →you need to change your mindset from the front end engineer to you being a software engineer that's specialized in client side applications. Exactly. So you need to look at all your knowledge in the front end and see how that applies to the back end. A very easy example, it's state. A lot of people think state, it's something that React invented or JavaScript frameworks have. But we do have state in the back end, too.
We just manage it differently. Actually, the database, it's a manifestation of state in a program. Whatever you have in memory when you execute an endpoint, that's also state. Take a look at all your knowledge and what you'll realize, it's, okay, what can I actually transfer to the back end? So, a lot of developers, when we work in the front end, we consume those things. But we got to move behind them and start looking at http as, you know, the protocol, you have security.
Now, a lot of those things are easy to understand if you have the right mental models and if you know computing, and if you really get at what everybody calls the fundamentals, which is basically algorithms and data structures.
