Super Backend Man - How to become an awesome backend developer

Bhanu Chaddha — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 11:33:14 +0000

You must have seen below image multiple times and If you ask my opinion, I would say the Iceberg could have been even more deeper. In my professional career, I have had hard time to answer this amazing question "What all a backend developer should know?".

Answer to this question is not a brief one and that's the reason, I thought of writing this article. Audience of this article are the people who already have the basic knowledge of one of the backend programming language like Java, Python, C#, Go or Node.js etc and wish to mature their craft.

Originally Posted at https://www.metakoder.com/blog/backend-developer-handbook/

Doing backend well is not easy. All the crucial components and most of the business rules live in the backend of an application, Its like brain to your whole system. So it's really important that backend should be reliable, maintainable and extendable.

But what do I mean by "reliable, maintainable and extendable" here? And how does a production grade backend software and architecture look like? This is what I want to demonstrate in this article. Consider this article as the index of a "Backend Developer Handbook". May be that's what I would like to name it , when it's finished.

Below you will find list of technologies and practices you would come across as a professional backend developer in the industry. A lot of frameworks and tools mentioned below are of Java/ JVM stack but concepts can also be translated to any other language like Python, C#, Go or Node.js. I would try my best to mention the language specific tools for each language. You can also mention in comments if you are aware of any better tools, I would add those in the article.

Goal of this article is to put good-to-know and must-know backend related topics at single place so that one can have a checklist of what he knows or may be it could help you to decide what you should learn next.

You can google these topics and I am pretty sure that you would find plenty of tutorial on each topic. I have also added relevant links to few of the topics, which might help you to shorten your search time. I have a plan to write detailed articles on these topics. I would link those coming articles to the respective topic in future.

So let's begin!!

Service Design - Best practices for writing a Service

Reactive Programming
Package hierarchy
Exception Handling
Domain models
Input and Output models
Errorcodes
Validations
Resilience (Resilience4J)
Service Contract
Common Rest Client
API Documentation (Swagger)
Code generation - Project Lombok
Aggregation
Routing
Transactions
Stateless Service
Service Manual
Service Deprecation
Service Versioning ( Multiple versions, backward compatibility)
Changelog

Design Patterns and Best Practices

Development Practices

Right way to review a Pull Request
Typical Developer Day - Time distribution
Business Knowledge Documentation
Code ownership, Open Source model
Handling Production Incidents

Common Used cases

CRUD API
REST Integration
SOAP integration
Mainframe Integration
Server Side Events
Analytics
Recommendation Engine
GraphQL Server
Handling Data stream
Video Streaming
Image Processing
Pagination during fetching items list
Filters during fetching items list

Platform Architecture

Scalability
Domain Driven Design
Simple crud application
Three Tier architecture
Monolith vs Microservices
DB: SQL vs NoSQL vs Casandra, Neo4j, graph db, time series db
Free text search capability ( Elastic Search )
Centralized Configuration
Service Discovery
Sidecar deployment
Client Side load balancing
API Gateway
Distributed Caching
Event driven microservice
Message Queue
Pub/Sub
Real time even processing - Kafka
Load Balancing
Inter-process communication
1. REST
2. Avro or Protocol Buffers
3. Message Bus
Distributed Session Management

Infrastructure

Service Proxy
Internet Gateway

Performance

Query Tuning
Indexing
Database Sharding
Read Replicas
Caching
Multi-Threading
Asynchronous Programming
Non Blocking Programming

Production Deployment (CI/CD)

Continuous Development
Staging Environments
Containers ( Docker )
Container Orchestration- Kubernetes
Jenkins
Deployment to Cloud
Green-Blue Deployment

Monitoring And Visibility

Monitoring Dashboard
Service admin features
Distributed Tracing (Zipkin, Sleuth)
Metrics, Prometheus, Grafana
Service Dependency graph

Logging and Aggregation

ELK Stack
Splunk

Testing

Unit Testing
API Testing ( RestEasy )
Integration Testing
Performance Testing ( Apache JMeter )
End to End testing ( Selenium, Cucumber)
Chaos Monkey
A-B Testing

Tools

IDE -Visual Studio Code
Rest Client - Postman
Automation - Apache JMeter
GIT
Terminal/ Command Prompt/ Cmder
Database Client Sqlectron
Packaging tools - Maven, Gradle

Development Libraries

Security

Authentication
Authorization
OAuth
JWT
OpenId

Cloud Native

Serverless
Auto Scaling
Highly Available

Looks like, this list would always be an ongoing work. I would keep adding and updating the topics as I would become wiser. You can also help me to make this list better. If you think any other backend development related topic should be part of this list, do mention that in comments and I would add the topic in the article.

Thank for reading!! Cheers!!

DEV Community: Bhanu Chaddha