Aly Badawy

Delivery Is Part of Being Full-Stack

Web Development
Wednesday, Sep 3, 2025

When we talk about full-stack developers, the conversation usually stops at:

  • Can you build the UI?
  • Can you write the backend logic?
  • Can you connect the database?

All of those are important — but they only cover one half of the job.
The other half, which often gets ignored, is delivery.

The Interview That Sparked This

Just last week, I interviewed a candidate for a technical lead role.
His résumé proudly listed “Full-Stack Developer.”

When I asked about deployments, he admitted:

  • He had never written a CI/CD pipeline.
  • He had no real experience with automated testing in delivery.
  • Deployments? Always handled by “someone else.”

This wasn’t a junior developer — this was a lead candidate.

That’s when it hit me again: too many people wear the full-stack label without owning the full stack.

Full-Stack vs. Front+Back

There’s a big difference between being full-stack and simply being front+back.

Front+back means:

  • You can write APIs.
  • You can design UIs.
  • You can connect the database to the code.

Full-stack means all of that plus:

  • Knowing how that code gets packaged and shipped.
  • Understanding the delivery pipeline.
  • Owning what happens when the code hits production.

Without delivery, you don’t have a stack.
You just have pieces of one.

Delivery Is Not Optional

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
👉 If you can’t deliver your code, you don’t own it.

And no, I don’t mean you need to be a DevOps wizard or a cloud cost-optimizer.
But you must understand the essentials:

  • How your code gets from local to production.
  • Why pipelines exist, and what they test for.
  • What “good enough testing” means before shipping.
  • The basics of servers, permissions, and networking.

Delivery is not an optional skill.
It’s not a “nice-to-have.”
It’s the bare minimum for calling yourself full-stack.

Why This Gap Exists

So why do so many developers stop at localhost?
A big reason is how we teach and train.

I’ve seen hundreds of tutorials on:

  • “Build a weather app in React.”
  • “Create a CRUD API in Django.”
  • “Make your first mobile app with Swift.”

And almost none that cover:

  • “How to publish to the App Store.”
  • “How to deploy to production.”
  • “How to configure a staging environment and pipeline.”

It’s as if the end goal is “works on simulator” or “runs on localhost.”
But in real life, that’s just the starting point.

We are raising developers who are excellent at coding features, but hesitant — sometimes terrified — when it’s time to deploy them.

The Cost of Ignoring Delivery

Here’s what happens when developers don’t learn delivery:

  1. Fear of Deployment
    Teams delay releases because no one feels confident shipping.

  2. Over-reliance on “Ops”
    Developers throw code over the wall and wait. Ops becomes a bottleneck.

  3. Shallow Ownership
    Developers feel like their job ends at “it works on my machine.”

  4. Lost Career Growth
    Without delivery skills, developers stall out. They can’t transition into senior, lead, or architect roles — because those roles require end-to-end understanding.

My Early Days: Learning the Hard Way

When I started, deployment meant FTP.
I would copy files one by one to a shared hosting service, cross my fingers, and hope the site didn’t break.

Later, I graduated to VPS servers:

  • Manually configuring firewalls.
  • Creating user accounts.
  • Installing dependencies by hand before even pulling code from GitHub.

Was it painful? Absolutely.
But I learned how things really worked.
I learned why file permissions matter.
I learned what happens when you misconfigure a web server.
I learned the hard way what “downtime” means.

That foundation made me a stronger developer — not because I enjoyed late-night outages, but because I understood the full picture.

What Delivery Teaches You

When developers learn delivery, they gain more than just technical skills.

They gain:

  • Confidence: no more fear of pushing to production.
  • Accountability: owning what happens after “it works on my laptop.”
  • Empathy: understanding the impact of code on ops, on costs, and on users.
  • Speed: fewer handoffs, faster releases, tighter feedback loops.

Delivery is not just about pipelines — it’s about mindset.
It’s about realizing your job doesn’t end when the feature compiles.

For Recruiters: Words Matter

One more thing: recruiters and job postings often make this worse.

Too many listings say “Full-Stack Developer” when what they really mean is “web developer who can do React and a bit of backend.”

That mismatch creates frustration:

  • Candidates think they’re qualified.
  • Teams expect more than they’re getting.
  • The title gets diluted.

If you want front+back, say front+back.
If you want full-stack, that means delivery.

My Take

Being full-stack is not just about frameworks and syntax.
It’s about owning the journey of code from idea → database → UI → production.

Without delivery, the stack is incomplete.
Without delivery, you’re not really full-stack.

So here’s my challenge to developers:
👉 Don’t stop at localhost. Don’t stop at Docker. Don’t stop at “works on my machine.”

Learn delivery.
Own your code.
And watch your career — and your projects — grow.