Full-Stack Web Development With Your Custom Tech Stack

In the late 1990s (bear with me please 😅), learning how to develop full-stack web applications was different. There were no web frameworks, only a handful of backend programming languages, and a couple of database choices. So yeah, there was less to learn compared to today.

We read books, a lot of books. We also talked to peers; people who were in the same boat, with the same goals. Most importantly though, we wrote code.

With every line of code you write, edit, or delete, you learn something.

Learning full stack web development today is hard

There are two fundamental challenges today:

1. No educational content for your exact tech stack
2. Outdated or shallow content

1. No educational content for your exact tech stack

Every Tuesday, we witness the release of a new web framework. By Thursday, it has its own approach to how you style DOM elements. By the time people enjoy their weekends, v2 is released which requires more JavaScript to generate CSS while all along, the browser still only understands CSS to style web apps 😎.

As if this wasn’t enough, you also have to choose whether to use a full stack framework like SvelteKit, Next.js, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, … or separate your frontend and backend and use a REST or GraphQL API to communicate.

What about CSS frameworks? Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, Foundation, Bulma, Materialize, Semantic UI, UIKit, Ant Design, Material-UI, Tachyons, Spectre.css, Pure, Milligram, Skeleton, Susy, Primer, Picnic CSS, Buefy, Fomantic-UI (a fork of Semantic UI), Halfmoon, …

🤯

Your best bet is to pick a stack and start building. As you build, you learn, grow and adjust your tech stack based on your experience. However, finding blog posts or courses related to that exact tech stack is very difficult. In a work environment, a certain tech stack is likely already in place. Here too, finding educational material that covers that exact tech stack is hard.

It is much more likely that you end up with a fragmented learning experience: you learn about web development, then about APIs, about backend services, about databases, about deployments, security, observability – all in isolation. You then still have to connect all the dots and make sure it all works together.

2. Outdated or shallow content

I published a book with 200+ pages and released a 8-hour video course on full stack web development. Both were outdated within a few weeks.

The same applies to written educational content you read every day. It gets even worse when you watch educational tech videos as updating video content is so much work, video content creators rarely bother.

In recent years, a new phenomenon has appeared in the tech education space:

Click-baity influencers

These are people who take advantage of the YouTube and Tiktok algorithms. It’s people who come up with an (often controversial) opinion on every topic, every day, all day long and record a video to share their opinion. The more videos, the better. The more controversial, the better. Videos have to be released quickly as possible to take full advantage of the algorithms promoting the content. In programming terms: engagement++; usefulness--;

It’s an incredibly lucrative business model, but it provides absolutely zero value to people who truly want to learn and become better at developing full stack web applications, IMHO.

Webstone Education – Your tech stack, always up-to-date

Imagine a world where you select what web framework you want to learn, how you want to style your application, what the API / backend technology is, and where to persist the data. You get a course with exactly what you want and on top of that, you will receive updates as technologies evolve.

That’s what Webstone Education is all about.

How does Webstone Education work?

I’m glad you asked 😅. Our full stack web development courses are based on five modules:

• Web
• Styles
• API type
• API
• Database

As a student, you select a technology for each module. With that, you are guaranteed to learn exactly what matters to you. Furthermore, you learn in the context of a single application which improves your learning experience and leads to a higher retention of the knowledge you obtain. Developing software in context is also how you develop software in the real world.

Once you’ve chosen your tech stack, Webstone Education generates your personalized course and creates a new learning repository in your GitHub account. This repository contains the lessons and a place for you to write your code to follow along as you work your way through a course.

If any technology of the five modules that make up your course changes, you receive a pull request (PR) in your learning repository. That PR contains the code to upgrade to the latest version of the technology that changed. The PR also includes upgrade instructions so you understand what changed and why.

We use the same PR mechanism to distribute new lessons, updated best practices, security fixes, etc. to all students.

With Webstone Education, you are a life-long learner and stay up-to-date as technologies evolve. Take your learnings and apply them to your own projects.

Community, office hours, instructor-led courses

Learning should always be a team effort, it’s just so much easier and more fun that way.

Join our Discord community!

We’re just getting started with all that, but you can meet students, instructors, ask questions, share success stories, showcase what you’re building, etc.

Over the next little while, we are going to prepare instructor-led courses for people who prefer that over self-learning.

What’s next?

All pieces of the platform are in place and we have been working with a dozen beta students. Our focus at the moment is on creating content for the Todo Application. The Todo Application with SvelteKit, CSS, and a PostgreSQL database will be available for free, while any other technology choice will be a paid course.

Our pricing structure is simple:

• Buy a lifetime deal, get access to all courses and all technologies OR
• Buy one course, for one specific technology stack

Regardless of which option you choose, you pay a one-time price and we provide you with ongoing updates and improvements.

Welcome to Webstone Education!