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Chad R. Stewart
Chad R. Stewart

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A Front-End Engineer’s Journey into Back-End Engineering

“Hello, I’m Chad Stewart. I’m a Front-End Engineer from Kingston, Jamaica.”

That’s been the synopsis of myself for the last 2 years. I can and do recite it without effort whenever someone asks me the question ‘tell me about yourself?’. I’ve done Full Stack Engineering a few times in my career… but I don’t really know Backend Engineering very well. It’s always been an interest of mine but I didn’t know where to start to really hone my skills. And then zenhorace put up the YouGo Back End Project and I decided “why not?” and started to work on it.

This blog post series will describe my progress through this project.

You can find the description of the YouGo Backend Project here.

I’ll cover a few major events in the creation of this project:

  • The Software Design Document
  • Writing a Swagger spec
  • Using TypeScript
  • Passing images as a base64 string
  • Validating user requests
  • Writing the Image manipulation endpoints
  • Writing tests
  • Converting the app to using buffers instead of reading the writing from disk
  • Deployment and getting feedback
  • Some miscellaneous work

You can find the project itself here.

In the next article of this series, I’ll start off talking about writing the Software Design Document for this project.

Oldest comments (2)

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

The transition was hard for me to begin with because i'm more visual and backend is more about API's and databases. But now I like them both as much as each other.

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chad_r_stewart profile image
Chad R. Stewart

I can definitely understand that. I've been doing Front-End Engineering for years and I do appreciate the immediate feedback you doing that work. Closest thing I ever got was having test cases set up and running them whenever I was developing a new feature during this project. Also had logs which is A GOD SEND!! I don't think I can live without logs now, lol.