Your Backend Journey
So we have just defined our objective and the topics we'll cover to achieve it. Keep that in mind as you make progress on this journey.
Before we dive into the what the backend is, here's an overview of what you can expect to happen, learn, and practice during the BE module.
🗺️ Your BE Journey Itinerary
We'll start by learning, at a high level, the theory of:
- How do computers communicate over the internet
- How do web apps work
- What is an API
- How we can create our own APIs using best practices.
You'll also have the opportunity to practice and expand your programming skills.
Alongside some newly introduced libraries, you'll learn how to use the JavaScript language to build your own bit of the internet - a backend server, specifically an API, and make it available on the internet for others to access and retrieve data from.
Once we nail the core bits of APIs and learn some best practices, we're going to look at how we can add more interesting bits to make them more powerful - interaction with databases and enriching them with middlewares.
To help us understand how we can interact in an async manner with files, databases and other APIs, we'll learn about (and practice) Asynchronous JS.
We'll also introduce you to a new language named SQL (either pronounced "ess-que-el" or "sequel") for interacting with databases.
Towards the very end, you'll improve the capabilities and robustness of your APIs by:
- learning how to write better tests (with some new JS testing library) and automate them
- how to add middlewares (which can make APIs more secure or enrich with authentication and logging).
- publish and launch your APIs publicly on the internet for others to use anytime
Along the way we will be there to support you by introducing new concepts, explain how they relate, link you to more materials and help answer your questions (which sometimes may mean guiding you towards the answer first). This is so that you can learn how to do your own research, learn how to check documentation and also ask great questions :)
All of this continues to build on and grow your knowledge in Javascript, which you can then take with you on your journey as software engineer.
✈️ Your journey begins... now!
And it starts with learning some basic backend concepts.
