Them: I want to be a full stack developer!

Me: Are you sure?

Them: Yeah. absolutely I'll do whatever it takes!

Me: I'll hold you to that, I will piss you off everyday if I have to, to get you learning.

Them: OK, yeah, do it!

Some weeks later

Them: I want to be a front end developer, routing and models are confusing.

Me: I would laugh you out of an interview, keep practicing and just stick with one thing before chasing the next quick reward endeavor until the difficulty curve ramps up and you give up on that too!

Them: ... But it's hard...

Me: So practice, over and over until it sinks in, it's like playing the cello or whatever, just keep practicing!

Shouldn't you learn front end first before even thinking of becoming a full stack dev? It only seems logical.

@Xevion I don't suppose it matters which order as they are both equally important.

@Xevion How do you practically learn the front end, exclusively on your own with noone working with you. It's all or nothing in most introductory web dev books.

@nmunro there are loads of places to learn front end from. Many courses online are only focused on front end stuff.

@nblackburn equally important, yes. But I think it's exremely difficult to retain any information if you're starting in both ends. I would personally start with the fron end, since it's easier to directly see what you have created and get a sense of progress.

@Xevion And he'd done a bunch of those and wanted to go to the next level. He asked me what I did for a job and told him. He then wanted to do what I do. Difference is, I went to university and studied programming for four years and ran a company for a couple. He keeps jumping around.

I'm making him learn the mean stack because he already has some JavaScript experience and I figured at this point introducing ruby, python or php (along with their respective build tools) was gonna be too much, especially in the case of PHP.

I just find it frustrating that he can't keep focused on the task at hand and keeps jumping interests when he hits the inevitable brain bending moments we all experience.