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Ishan Mishra
Ishan Mishra

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Backend Essentials-Jack of all trades OR King of one?

1. Overview

This series is all about making the basics Web Development strong. This series is not a tutorial about NodeJs, React, Django or any other fancy frameworks/libraries, although some articles may contain code written using these frameworks/libraries.

2. What this series is about 🤔🤔?

This series explores basics of different skills/fields of back end engineering. For example "what is UPD and TCP?", "what is HTTP 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0?, what is HTTPS?", rather than talking about "How to use simple-peer and socket.io for video chat application" we will explore "what is WebRTC?", "What are proxies and reverse-proxies?" and many more...

3. Intended audience

A. Much of the content in this series is for Everyone, some articles may contain codes written in JavaScript using node, express...
B. If you have tasted some of the back end engineering and want to make the basics more strong and also want to choose a particular field to dive deep into it, than this series is very helpful for you.

4. What this series do not cover??

Throughout this series we will focus mainly on theoretical aspects. This series does not focus on teaching any back end frameworks or libraries, I will try to provide codes wherever possible but will not be explained deeply it would be the reader's choice to get basic understanding of back end frameworks and libraries used in that code.

5. Different Back End Engineering Skills

Format=> Fields: Some topics in those fields
A. Communication Protocols: TCP, UDP, HTTP, WebSockets...
B. Servers: Dynamic and Static WebServers, ETags, Caching, ...
C. Database Engineering: Relational, NoSQL, ACID, ...
D. Proxies: Proxy, Reverse Proxy, Load Balancers, ...
E. Caching: Staefull, stateless, ...
F. Messaging Systems
G. Web Frameworks: Express, Django, Rest API'S ...
H. Message Formats: JSON, ...
I. Security: TLS, Encryption, Firewalls, ...
and others...

6. Jack of all trades OR King of one??

You can either be an integrator knowing something of every thing and your work is to integrate different stuffs together to make something useful and stable. But if someone wants to make a new database according to their needs they will not hire you they will hire a database engineer specialized in that field. In short you could either know some about every stuff maybe the "The Full Stack Developer" or Choose one field become expert(⚠️) and be known for that field.

7. Conclusion

Through this series we will get into basics of most of the fields discussed in point 5 and your work is to note everything you like and get deep into those things. I will post an article weekly on this series.


[1]: How to Become a Good Backend Engineer (Fundamentals)[Hussein Nasser]


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