A year ago I had to patch its package for an internal use case. Their codebase is fairly well-written I thought (at least the JS SDK).

e.g. this is where they add the `fetch` breadcrumb https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/blob/develop/...

e.g. where the actual monkey patching happens https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/blob/e1783a65...

Besides, I do a 12h route at least once a year, and yes I always have them on unless I'm stretching my legs or going to the toilet because that's the safety recommendation—not because I like it—I don't get your point.

It's not AWS fault here, it's the companies', which assume that it will never be down. In-house servers also have outages, it's a very naive assumption to think that it'd be all better if all of those services were using their own servers.

Facebook doesn't use AWS and they were down for several hours a couple weeks ago, and that's because they have way better engineers than the average company, working on their infrastructure, exclusively.

[https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-hom...: CDN Fastly Wins Content Delivery Business For Amazon.com and IMDB Websites)

Quoting:

> "But with small object delivery, like images loading fast on Amazon’s home page, it’s the opposite. Customers will pay for a better level of performance and in this case, Fastly clearly outperformed Amazon’s own CDN CloudFront. This isn’t too surprising since CloudFront’s strength isn’t web performance, or even live streaming, but rather on-demand delivery of video and downloads."

In the occasion, they didn't upload it anywhere, but she discovered because in the moment she was picking up her device back somehow (don't know the details) she saw one of her half-naked pictures in the technician computer.

This is 100% accurate in my experience too, and it's also true in the other way around: "full-stack" means backend developer who can put a basic SPA using React/Vue.

From the frontend perspective: they call themselves full-stacks for knowing how to spin up a NodeJS HTTP Server powered by Express with MongoDB inserting JSON in the database. But they are missing:

- AWS/cloud computing: not necessarily creating the infrastructure (although that's a must on more senior levels), but how to orchestrate the different components together.

- databases: why SQL/NoSQL, beyond basic SELECTs, knowing how to properly add indexes, debug why queries are slow, modeling, understanding locks implications and transaction levels, and so on.

- tooling: how to set up a bundler, linter and formatter, testing, CI/CD. This overlaps a bit with the responsibilities of the DevOps engineer, but a full-stack should know at least on intermediate level all of those things. I can't say how many times I've seen "senior full-stacks" that had no clue about how webpack worked at all.

From the backend perspective: they call themselves full-stacks for knowing how to spin up a React/Vue app that does basic CRUD operations using forms, powered by a UI framework like Material UI. But they are missing:

- CSS: most will find CSS hard/annoying and won't bother understanding at all how it works even on a fundamental level, will defer to hacks most of the time to make things work, especially when it comes to adjusting for edge cases like responsive design or cross-browser support.

- the DOM: normally they don't understand it at all, or to a very limited extent.

- Web vitals: how to measure and makes things faster and performant—not really including here overly optimized, but just making sure your app is 60fps or close to that most of the time. Usually when things get slow either on the network side or in the app itself, those engineers will blame is the framework/library, not their misusage of it.

--

Those lists are definitely non-exhaustive, as I didn't even mention more advanced stuff like protocols (how HTTP works? most can't answer), caching, etc etc, but you can get the point I'm trying to make:

The problem with the term full-stack is that only very few engineers really are sufficiently great on both sides of the stack and could say that they mastered both, simply because there's just too much to learn! Frontend has become so much more complex with SPAs compared when it was about rendering static HTML with some CSS and basic behavior with jQuery. Same for backend with the advent of cloud computing and several types of databases.

I've been coding professionally for a decade and I've met only a single engineer that I'd consider him full-stack (he checked all those boxes I mentioned and more). I think I would also include myself, because I spent 50% of my career spent as a front-end engineer, became senior, then I transitioned to back-end engineering because it pays the same or more and it's less stressful (for most of the regular companies that most of us work at). My current title is "principal full stack engineer", but in practice I only do backend/devops, I don't actively code front-end but I keep up with the industry by following the new trends and testing things here and there in personal projects.

Ultimately, I believe for being a full-stack engineer you have to be first a front-end (or back-end engineer) then learn the other, what we have today is most people doing the same from the very beginning of their careers and they either go deep on a single one or in none of them.

I was born in a Latin America country, middle class family, 375 USD monthly income for a house of 6 people.

Although I never went a full day without eating at least two meals, it wasn't rare to go sleep hungry.

My mom still managed to buy a PC for us, and that alone changed everything: I discovered programming in my early teens through a MMO game and learned web development, and since then I never stopped.

I'm now on my mid-twenties, but because I started so early with programming, I kinda hacked my career growth: to this day I already have 10 years of experience with JavaScript, as I was still a teen on my first internships. Started a CS bachelor but dropped as it was waste of time for me.

Today I work as the principal software engineer for a US startup remotely, and make 40x of my country's minimum wage.

Living through this gave me an empathy that I believe it's really hard to develop if you were born rich (definition of rich here: >upper middle class). There are so much things people take for granted, and they aren't available for people in lower classes at all. Geography is the biggest inequality in the world by a large margin.