This summer I took the road far less traveled.. Having worked for Texas Instruments as my previous summer's Software Internship, I reaped the benefits of having a full time job. Hell, I was making almost 50k as an intern in a state with no state tax -- gotta love Texas. Fully paid living, endless beer, and beautiful Dallas babes.. Why did I even leave??

I don't want to go in depth on what I did for the company because I have a feeling I wrote some seriously wrong database query methods that could very easily be SQL Injected, but it was my first exposure to web development: Microsoft Visual Studio (VB.NET). HTML/CSS/Javascript, I figured out the basics, and I learned how to make serious web scrapers. I thought I was one badass software intern, lol.

I really do thank Texas Instruments for providing me with the opportunity to get started in web development, but all the work I did there merely scratched the surface of what Web 2.0 could do. Last winter, I decided to give Ruby on Rails a shot (shout out to Michael Hartl for one of the best, free, online Rails tutorial). Rails is fucking tough man.. It really did baffle me why they would separate the Models, Views, and Controllers just to render a simple static page. By the end of that tutorial, I still had no idea where to begin, but I had a much better idea of how the MVC interacted, and I also had a glimpse of how easy it is to make Rails dynamic.

And then this summer came rolling along.. I'm currently working part time to pay rent and booze, while working overtime on my startup product. tessle.com Being the only coder on a full stack development project is both physically and mentally draining, but I can safely say that I have learned 50 times as much as I did working for Texas Instruments. So without further ado, here are the rewards of full stack web development: You..

• Master relational databases
• Become a master of your framework
• Understand Javascript and Frontend Development for all of the web
• Firebug/View source on everything that looks remotely cool
• Understand how to debug any and all situations for your application
• Contribute to open source -- stack overflow, railscasts
• Learn why github and heroku are absolute necessities for making your life easier
• Appreciate how damn hard development can be
• Evolve into a coding badass
• Have a coding baby, one that you have nurtured for the past 6 months which you can proudly call your own... :')

Give it a shot. Even if your baby doesn't grow into anything, you will learn way more than sitting at a desk pretending to do work.