What is Back-End Development?
We all hear about topics such as development, software and things that relate to that. Developers are sometimes seen as mystical humans who type on a computer and magic comes out, or rather, code. It helps that they are somewhat romanticized through movies, where hackers appear to be typing stuff in consoles in real time, to hack a device, as if they are doing a code battle.
The process of development is often difficult and riddled with issues where we have to go through a plethora of the said issues, to even make things working, let alone for them to be optimized.
Today, we spend a lot of time interacting with the internet, visiting sites and using applications. We only see the front-end of those applications, which is meant to be seen and interacted with by the user.
However, it’s the back-end that powers things and actually does the work. Here is what back-end development actually is.
Back-end Development Explained
Since we established that the front-end of development refers to the part that the user interacts with, the back-end then has to be the other part, that the user never sees or interacts with, but that does a lot of work behind the scenes, powering everything and doing the logical work.
Back-end development focuses on the server side of things for websites and applications, such as databases, the logic and everything the user doesn’t see but which powers their experience. Given that there are so many sites and applications, a back-end developer’s job will vary from company to company, especially depending on the project they are working on.
Running the back-end of a small wordpress site is nothing compared to working on the back-end of an office suite like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
What A Back-end Developer Actually Does
Back-end developers can work on a plethora of things, given how networking is one of the most complex aspects of programming. From databases, to searches, working on building new trees and optimizing search speeds and prediction results, a back-end developer can work on a plethora of things.
They can update code, the core logic of the service they are working on, or work on other things that interact with the core logic, such as the database. APIs are typically worked on, not to mention even more databases.
Back-end Programming Languages
For the back-end, two types of programming languages are used, object-oriented or functional. In practice, this means several popular languages, namely PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, SQL, Go, TypeScript and more.
It is important to know at least one of these languages, though it would be better to work in at least three of them. It is very likely that even different projects within the same company would have different programming languages.
However, once you start getting the gist of it, transitioning to a new language is easier than learning the entire concept of back-end development from scratch.
Is It a Good Career Choice?
Back-end development will always be a great career choice, as long as the internet is being used. Back-end development is very important and such developers earn more money than front-end ones, at least on average.
While it is a competitive market, given the vast number of sites, applications and services that run on the web, back-end developers will always have a job.
