Introduction

Modern web development is both an exciting & tiring field. Javascript standards, frontend frameworks, backend frameworks, and deployment solutions are constantly evolving in the never ending battle to augment web software engineering.

While much of the innovation in the field has been groundbreaking, it has come with the expense of significant time up front to learn & master the necessary tooling and paradigms. This is especially true for junior engineers just entering the world of modern web development.

At Thinkster, we saw this happening first hand with the developers learning on our site. The most common question we are asked is "how do I use {X} frontend framework with {Y} backend framework to create a fullstack app?". Indeed, if you search how to build fullstack apps on Google, you'll find hundreds of different recommendations that are all specific to one set of technologies (React+Node, Angular+Rails, etc) — none let you choose your ideal frontend and backend.

This came as no surprise to us — we know first hand that creating a single fullstack tutorial is a lot of work, much less creating a tutorial for every possible frontend & backend combo out there. But then we had an idea:

What if we created a fullstack tutorial series where every frontend & every backend built the exact same app & API endpoints?

That would allow learners to mix & match any frontend tutorial with any backend tutorial and learn how to to build a fullstack app with them.

These aren't the only benefits we discovered to this approach though — having the same project specifications across all tutorials also makes the process of learning new frontends & backends substantially faster.

What you will learn

We feel that learning is best accomplished by "doing", and as such, throughout this tutorial series we will be creating a production ready Medium.com clone called "Conduit" powered by your choice of our supported frontend & backend frameworks.

You can view a live demo of the application here. Conduit is a fully featured social blogging site including:

• Authentication with JWT
• Profiles with images
• Write/edit/read articles
• Comments on articles
• Ability to "favorite" articles
• Ability to follow other users & have their articles show up in your feed

Building Conduit covers most of the advanced use cases and best practices of each framework. Every frontend and backend was created & vetted by the open source community via the RealWorld Github project — a project we created (and maintain) specifically for this tutorial series.

Supported frontends & backends

We're always working on adding more frontend & backend stacks to this tutorial series. We also keep all of our existing stacks up-to-date with the latest framework versions & updates.

We currently support the latest versions of any combination of the following frontends & backends:

FRONTENDS

• React / Redux — tutorial, github repo
• AngularJS — tutorial, github repo
• Angular 2+ — tutorial, github repo

BACKENDS

• Node.js — tutorial, github repo
• Django — tutorial, github repo
• Rails — tutorial, github repo

For your convenience, we also have a hosted API that you can build your frontend applications against should you not be interested in building out a backend (instructions for this are covered in each of the frontend tutorials).

Who this is for

This tutorial series was made to accomodate both junior and senior developers looking to master fullstack development. While the step-by-step instructions are particularly useful for junior developers just starting to learn fullstack development, the advanced use cases & best practices covered in each tutorial provide a birds-eye view for senior devs looking to keep their skills sharp and up-to-date.

Lets start learning!

It took over a year to create the RealWorld project and this corresponding tutorial series, and we're honored to finally pull back the curtain on our solution for mastering fullstack development. We couldn't be more excited to have you on board learning with us.

With that all said, lets start learning how to build real world fullstack apps!