Textbook in PDF format As a working software developer, you know how to complete your tasks with solid code, whether it's on the frontend or backend. Now you're ready to move to the next level in your career, and you need to understand the subtle yet deep skills it takes to become a senior developer. This practical book shows you everything it takes to create a full-stack web application hosted on a cloud platform. Senior staff engineer Milecia McGregor helps you see how the whole system works and how senior developers arrive at technical decisions. You'll learn about design and development principles and when to apply them. You'll also discover strategies for working with different teams and understand how the product team makes its decisions. My goal with this book is to give you a reference—kind of a sanity check—for when you’re working on either greenfield or legacy projects across the frontend and backend and handling deployments. Some questions are relevant for both types of projects, like how you’ll handle testing, performance, and security. Many applications have core commonalities that you can use regardless of the industry you work in. When those moments come where you find yourself questioning why you’ve never heard of something, hopefully this book will make you feel more confident asking those “simple” questions. In four parts, this book shows you how to: Translate designs into tasks and learn the questions you'll need to ask the product team Walk through development considerations for the backend like overall architecture, security, and third-party services Build the project's user interface as well as state and data management, performance, and other concerns associated with frontend apps Connect the frontend, backend, and other systems and deploy a full stack app to production Who This Book Is For: If you are trying to figure out how senior devs seem to magically know how everything works and how they understand complex concepts so quickly, I’m going to show you how. At this point in your career, you’ve probably been working as a software developer for a few years. You know how to complete your tasks with solid code regardless of whether it’s on the frontend or backend. While you may have some knowledge across the full stack, it’s likely you focus on one part of the stack over the other. On the frontend, you should be familiar with making responsive layouts, fetching data from APIs, and using some of the frameworks, such as React, Astro, or Svelte. On the backend, you’ve done some database migrations, built some APIs, and handled some basic authentication flows. You also have skills like using Git with any of the repo hosting services, such as GitHub or GitLab, and using different tools to test your changes. You may have worked on one project for years, or you may have hopped around projects, but the scope of your work has typically fallen under some of the concepts mentioned. Now you’re ready to move to the next level in your career. That means learning how the whole system works and why technical decisions are made. That’s what will be covered in this book