Which is wonderful if you're an old hat who enjoys having new people get frustrated and leave before they have a chance to contribute to the ecosystem.
There's really very little excuse for not knowing enough front-end stuff to consider yourself a "full-stack web developer".
HTML/CSS are easy-peasy, and while some people don't like Javascript, it's hard to get away from and you can only increase your value as a developer by being able to work with it. Add to that a little bit of client-side tooling knowledge (Gulp, SCSS/LESS), and some familiarity with jQuery and you're good to go. Shouldn't take more than a week tops to get the hang of it all; no-one's saying you have to be a wizard.
You don't have to love front-end work (I enjoy it, but I also really like doing back-end work so I understand both perspectives), but you're doing yourself and anyone who employs you a disservice by not being at least a somewhat-solid front-end dev. Early-stage startups don't really have room for people without that level of versatility. If you're going to write code, you should be able to write front-end code, back-end code, and be able to administrate your startup's servers to some degree. If you can only do front-end, you'd better be at least a decent designer. If you can only do backend, you ought to be doing some kick-ass ops work. The phrase "T-shaped individual" comes to mind.
While amazing generalists/full-stack guys are great, having very strong individuals own a particular domain of the code can have its benefits as well. Sure, you miss a bit of oversight, but when you're in the building phase and you just want to Get Shit Done, it helps if you don't have someone else mucking around in your code while you're building it.
Absolutely, hence my comment towards the end about having T-shaped individuals. I worked on a startup team recently where responsibilities were pretty cleanly divided: I worked on the front end, and a coworker worked on the backend.
Both of us were much stronger at our chosen domains than the other, but we were also both strong enough on the other end to fill in any gaps. If we were doing mostly front-end stuff for a sprint, he was able to jump in without me having to worry about it, and vice-versa.
IMO, that's the kind of full-stack developers that early-stage startups (that aren't specifically tech-focused, eg language processing) need.
The short version is that is exactly what being a RIA is.
I have no relationship with anyone in this particular chain of companies, although I did work at "big financial corp" a long time ago. It might help to define and provide analogies based on that experience.
So valuedinvesting is a registered investment advisor. The focus of those people is providing advice. They can't buy or sell anything but they can recommend and "help" you do it. Where "help" is in quotes because exactly how much of the work they're legally allowed to do is fuzzy to me and probably fuzzy to them too.
(Edited to add a RIA analogy is they're like an analyst role in tech... or maybe a product manager role. They don't actually write code but they talk to both sides of the fence a lot to theoretically smooth the process along to everyone's best interests, well, theoretically)
The guy who actually buys sells stocks is apparently Motif a broker-dealer. How much advice a broker-dealer can provide without also having to register as a RIA is a pretty fuzzy topic. There are plenty of brokers with in-house team of RIA willing to talk to you. Their primary business is being a broker not being an advisor. It is highly unlikely they'll give you advice that does not help the broker side of the house improve its revenue numbers. I'm not claiming the in-house RIA of any brokers currently under discussion are biased, but historically it has happened in other situations. So I wouldn't personally do business with a RIA linked to a broker. (edited to add, in an otherwise factual post, the preceding was strictly my personal opinion and you will hear good opposite arguments) Its like asking your barber how often you should get a haircut, what do you think he's going to say...
(for what its worth I worked for some time at an outsourcing technology provider for broker-dealers and to a lesser extent we provided some services to RIAs)
Motif is in the SIPC which I won't bother linking to but they basically are insurance like FDIC for retail end users. So if everyone goes bankrupt, SIPC will provide you with what you owned before the bankruptcy. Like a general contractor's bonding insurance.
Motif uses (probably?) Apex as a clearing house. A clearing house is like insurance between brokers analogous to how SIPC is insurance between retail investors and the broker.
If you'd like an analogy, its kind of like I paid my roofer to buy materials and install a roof as per his advice. I could have theoretically contacted the shingle manufacturer or his rep directly, at least in theory, and he may even be a licensed contractor. However I'm doing business with "my favorite roofing contractor" specifically.
Static site generators are the new Fibonacci generator. When you learn a language it's a fun little exercise, and possibly even useful.
Also, everyone has slightly different requirements, so everyone likes to build their own.
I will most likely soon build my own static site generator, because none of the ones out there do exactly what I want. I will most likely borrow from at least a few of the examples out there and then post it on my github so there is yet another one.
I think we're seeing a proliferation simply because it is so easy to share code these days. Imagine how many Fibonacci generators would have been out there if it were as easy to share code when those were popular (I want to say 10 years ago but maybe it was longer).
Had the same problem ourselves while building Segment.io that every static site generator was a bit too opinionated in weird ways, so we made Metalsmith[0]. Check it out, and you might not need to make your own anymore :)
from math import sqrt
from decimal import Decimal
def fib(n):
x = Decimal((1 + sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
x -= Decimal((1 - sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
return x / Decimal(sqrt(5))
print fib(1000)
print fib(10000)
print fib(1290309123)
$ time python ~/fib.py
4.346655768693891359691727380E+208
3.364476487644307695949089018E+2089
2.879417086171668653426018537E+269658658
real 0m0.138s
user 0m0.086s
sys 0m0.026s
I've been looking at some of the options on that website, and this one seems to be less complex than many of the tools there. This isn't meant to be a blogging tool, but rather a simple way of emulating server-side includes or basic PHP includes in static HTML. I'm sure a few of those exist in that list, but when has "somebody built that already" become a gate for writing code?
