Backend web developer survey - how do we develop web apps & services?

Okay, so how do we develop web apps & services? That was a question I asked myself few weeks ago, and since then, I couldn't get my answer. I was looking around the internet for surveys - there are plenty of them, some of them excellent (such as Stack Overflow developer survey), but none of them gives in-depth answers about backend development I was looking for.

And therefore, I decided to start my own one.

What are you surveying for? ⁉

I want to know what are our habits when working on applications. How popular are ORMs? Are smaller projects more likely to use state-of-the-art technologies than larger projects? Are some new technologies such as GraphQL taking over? How many projects are still rendering views on backend? There's certainly a lot to be learned.

I could simply ask those questions, but I felt that it would make more sense to collect a list of habits and analyze it for conclusions later. And so, after filling in (anonymous) developer profile, you will be asked questions about APIs & presentation layer, controllers & middlewares, security, service layer, persistence, testing and developer tools. I hope that if enough people will participate from many different backgrounds, it will give us a clear picture on the current state of backend web development across platforms, frameworks, small and large projects!

What results are you hoping for? 🤔

As I already outlined above, I'm interested in finding out what is the current state of backend web development and what different habits people have depending on their background and platform. I'm very well aware that I can't judge it just based of my own working environment, or by few other working environments of my friends, and that's why I'd to know from many different people. I intent to use this information during research and development of my own web framework, that I talked about in this article.

I also believe that data collected in this survey can be helpful to framework and library developers, or maybe even some researches. That's why I'm indenting to open source raw dataset, most probably via GitHub.

Cool, I'm interested! 🤩 How can I participate?

This link will take you to the Google Form of this survey. You will need approx. 15-20 minutes to fill it. All questions are either single or multichoice, so no need to write in answers! In case you are working on two or more projects that are fundamentally different (think PHP Laravel vs Java Spring Boot), feel free to fill in survey for each project separately 🙂. For each participation I'm very grateful 🙏.