I’m a connector within our embedded systems design community and, so, my LinkedIn account has more than 15,000 connections. Which is where I recently started to spot what appears to be an emerging industry trend: so-called “full stack developers” have begun to enter the embedded software realm.
While many self-identified firmware developers and embedded programmers have come up to the field from the electronics side, often cutting their teeth in electrical engineering and digital design first, a full stack developer is a software engineer who works at all layers of a complex software system. For example, many full stack developers create websites that connect to relational databases and/or cloud-hosted APIs. In the process a single such developer might write code in languages ranging from JavaScript and Ruby to Python, C, and shell scripts to SQL and C#. All in the same month!
To accomplish this, a full stack developer need not be an expert in all of those languages nor software layers. Rather, he or she should be an adaptable sort who is able to copy and paste then tweak the necessary bits of “glue code” to connect together various commercial, open-source, and bespoke software packages running on a variety of operating systems across what is effectively a distributed computing platform. By necessity, things may not always work right the first or even second time; but the full stack developer chips away at all of those interfaces iteratively until the requirements are met–more or less.
What seems to be changing now is that embedded systems are being added to the “full stack” mix. Other software developers are no longer afraid to interface with or alter our systems and increasingly view IoT and other connected embedded systems as just another part of their project to be integrated as quickly as possible. I’m seeing evidence of this in the increase of developers with “full stack” in their job titles and expertise summaries within my network and communicating with us over at Barr Group.
Of course, when a full stack developer is not an expert in uniquely embedded systems challenges (e.g., the Top 10 Causes of Nasty Embedded Software Bugs) or does not exercise due care, this could increase the risks of failures of safety- and mission-critical systems.
What do you think? Are you a full stack developer working with embedded systems? Comment below.
