Backend Development:
In order to talk about back in development, let’s take a brief introduction into what front-end development is:
It’s the practice of creating user interfaces that are flexible and make it easy for a user to interact with data. Backend development is a practice of creating those plugs into the data, oftentimes called an application program interface or API. Think of the backend as a panel of plugs, where each plug returns a massaged subset of the data, and the panel itself hides away all the complexity of fetching from and updating to the database. Unlike front-end development, back-end isn’t specific to any one platform; in fact it serves as more like a foundation that supports whatever platforms sit on top of it.
To better help illustrate this imagine an ATM. When a user wants to withdraw $40 from their account, they’ll tap on various buttons on the machine (or our UI in this scenario) that then communicates to the backend to actually carry out those tasks. In panel of plugs analogy, imagine the front-end plugged into one plug called “get money”. That plug actually connects to several other plugs on the wall to do the business logic. One to check that the user actually has $40 in their account, and the other to subtract that amount from their balance. Developing each of those plugs is back-end development to make sure that the user interacts with the data safely.
A development stack usually involves two types of languages: one is a server-side programming language that helps build the API itself — commonly used are Python Java Ruby PHP and javascript. And the second is a SQL language to actually fetch the data from the database.
Below are two factors skills that I believe are essential to being an excellent back-end developer.
One is to have the architectural skills for making well-organized, extensible, and testable code. A big part of back-end is organizing logic and data, these skills allow for writing code with speed and quality.
And the second is to communicate clearly with front-end developers. Back-end developers are a big part of allowing users to do what they need to do. It’s a joint effort between front-end developers and back-end developers to write code to do just this.
