Abhishek Ghorashainee
Before beginning how to become a backend developer, let’s talk about what is backend developer. What are the different tasks involved in being a backend developer?
Firstly let’s understand two components of web development; front-end and backend.
If you visit a website, you will notice various buttons, text, and designs. Front-end developers are responsible for creating and designing these elements. But backend developers handle things like databases, API, servers, etc. These things are not directly visible to the users but play a big part in the functioning of a website.
Here are a few list of things that you can learn to become a backend developer. These points that I present are part of my personal opinion.
Firstly, you should learn about the Internet and how it works. Different concepts like How does the Internet work? What is HTTP? Browsers and how they work? What are DNS and hosting?. are the basics and vital parts of your working as a backend developer?
These concepts lie at the core of working as a backend developer.
The next step to becoming a backend developer is to learn a programming language. The programming language you choose must be capable of server-side scripting.
Server-side scripts are the script that runs on the server. You can choose any programming language like Python, Rust, PHP, C#, JavaScript, etc. My personal choice is Python. It is easy to learn for beginners.
Figure 1: Version Control System
A version control system like Git helps you to manage your code and do versioning on the code. It enables tracking of the changes. Also, you can quickly revert to the previous version if the code fails. You can learn VCS like Git and Git Hub.
You may be thinking, Why should I learn about OS? You should grasp OS because you need these concepts to host your application on a server and configure it. Linux Os is a widely used OS on servers. It is why you need to learn the basic commands of Linux. You need a basic understanding of additional concepts like Memory management, file handling, Process management, I/O management, etc. You don’t need to learn these things in deep as a beginner but learn the fundamental concept.
As a beginner, I recommend you learn about Relational Database management systems (RDBMS). You can choose any of the SQL-based databases. My recommendation is PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Figure 2: REST API
As a backend developer, your tasks heavily involve the development of API. You can learn different fundamentals related to APIs like REST, JSON APIS, and GraphQL. For beginners, I recommend learning about the REST.
The above six things are a few of the many things you need to become a backend developer. After you finish learning these concepts, you can learn about advanced concepts like caching, security, testing, software architecture, Containerization, etc.
Lastly, becoming a backend developer is a constant process of learning every day and evolving step by step. So, just focus on developing yourself daily and in no time you are a backend developer. For more detail roadmap you can visit Backend Roadmap.
