I am a software development engineer in test for Infosys. My job is officially to write automated tests in Selenium Webdriver. I'm also a web developer as a hobbyest
I like knowing how things work. When I was a kid, I broke open my parent's old VCR. No worries, it was in the basement collecting dust having been replaced by these "new fangled DVDs" that were then replaced by Bluerays a few years later. Anyways, I found it fascinating to see how all the interconnected parts were wired to some circuit board and motors with gears that turn the tape or eject it from the drive. I also remember way back when when my parents had some computer person open up our first computer. I remember being amazed by all the guts on the inside.
Knowing the back end is similar. It's often some sort of black box. There's this webpage here and you do stuff and there's a database there that reflects changes. But what's the thing in the middle that handles the changes? The back end. I want to know how it works. I want to know how everything connects together.
How best to know those things than to actually build one?
I made my first back end last summer. An old school Java Servlet back end to handle requests between my Vue front end and an Amazon RDS back end. It was for a bootcamp, or I would have picked Express as the back end. Wrote my first express back end about a month ago, between another Vue front end and a mongo back end.
There's such a great satisfaction to be found once you've got your rudimentary back end set up and your first test hit to the database is a success.
I like knowing how things work. When I was a kid, I broke open my parent's old VCR. No worries, it was in the basement collecting dust having been replaced by these "new fangled DVDs" that were then replaced by Bluerays a few years later. Anyways, I found it fascinating to see how all the interconnected parts were wired to some circuit board and motors with gears that turn the tape or eject it from the drive. I also remember way back when when my parents had some computer person open up our first computer. I remember being amazed by all the guts on the inside.
Knowing the back end is similar. It's often some sort of black box. There's this webpage here and you do stuff and there's a database there that reflects changes. But what's the thing in the middle that handles the changes? The back end. I want to know how it works. I want to know how everything connects together.
How best to know those things than to actually build one?
I made my first back end last summer. An old school Java Servlet back end to handle requests between my Vue front end and an Amazon RDS back end. It was for a bootcamp, or I would have picked Express as the back end. Wrote my first express back end about a month ago, between another Vue front end and a mongo back end.
There's such a great satisfaction to be found once you've got your rudimentary back end set up and your first test hit to the database is a success.
Thank you for your story! It's exciting to hear about it 🙂
I agree it's the ultimate way to learn how things work—to build them yourself! 🚀