Building websites has changed a lot in the last 10 years. In the past, websites were primarily informational, ran off in-house hardware, and required hiring an IT specialist to maintain. Today, websites have replaced entire desktop applications, and allow you to store all of your data in the cloud. Cloud services provide software we used to have to run and manage more directly (queues, notifications, storage, database, DNS management, etc.). The term “full stack” came to represent the skill set required to develop applications that include the all the layers of the application “stack” from IT infrastructure, server and database management, server-side application code, front-end technologies such as HTML/CSS/JavaScript, cross-browser compatibility, visual design, and user-experience design. So how does one write a full-stack web application? What are the needs-assessments one has to make to determine the right tools for the modern 21st Century web application? What does IT support and maintenance look like in the Cloud era? How do we manage all of the third-party software services to make them work for us efficiently? Web applications also have to interoperate with mobile applications. How do we make them do that? I’ll be talking about all of these things in the context of my own experience building bleeding-edge web applications.

About Speaker:

Dave Jackson has been working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley for 20 years. He has worked for such behemoths as Oracle, Yahoo, NASA Ames Research Center, as well as numerous start-ups. In 2014, he began freelancing, and in 2015 formally founded his consultancy—Green Mars Consulting. Green Mars Consulting has since grown > 120% year-over-year and added two other partners, Michael Scheper and Alan Post. We’ve run the gamut on cloud-based projects—biotech, consulting tools, collaboration, educational software, health management, build acceleration, financial software. Dave enjoys raising his toddler and writing fiction in his spare time.