Backend Developer Roadmap for 2020. In the era of internet-based mobile and web applications, the high reliance on powerful cloud servers and cheaper handheld or portable computing devices have increased the mankind’s accessibility over powerful applications at a cheaper cost. On the other end, dependency on backend computing tasks has grown exponentially that created an ocean of opportunities for backend developers.
2020 Backend Developer Roadmap
Backend developer roadmap for 2020 learnings is immensely deep which needs a lot of topics to be covered. Although we will cover some topics in this blog for the rest, we will provide a list that’s either already linked to blogs on those topics or we will be more detailed writing blogs on them.
Basic Frontend Knowledge
For frontend knowledge please refer to our previous blog “Frontend developer roadmap for 2020”
Data structure and OS concepts
Data structure and operating system concepts are key criteria’s that extract the best performance out of your code at the minimal expense on hardware so you must learn it in under your backend developer roadmap for 2020. Here’s a list of some concepts that you must learn:
- Time Complexity
- Space Complexity
- Memory Management
- Process Management
- Inter-Process Communication
- Threads handling
- Concurrency Management
- Using Terminal and its basic operations
- Common Conflicts with Operating System dependencies
Databases
For databases please refer our previous blog “Database Developers roadmap for 2020”
Caching
Caching is saving some data of web applications in local storage and later on referring this data. If any sort of data is being recursively used then developers save it on local storage and then refer to this data when next time it is requested by the application. Caching helps in enhancing user experience by reducing the latency in rendering the application. The data can be saved on the following 3 locations depending on where latency will be minimum in that use case. Although caching helps in enhancing user experience but it must be noted that that the data which needs to be secured is not cached.
1. Server Side
Server-side caching is usually done for data that is being pulled from a third-party resource or integration. For example, web designers add fancy fonts and components that are pulled from a third-party website so in such use case this data can be cached on server to reduce the latency in rendering application on the client system.
2. Client-Side
Client-Side caching is usually done for design-related images, CSS and js files. Client-side caching is most widely used in developing applications.
3. CDN
CDN (Content Delivery Network) are clusters of geographically distributed servers which are responsible for routing requests from the client machine to the closest server for delivering content with minimum latency. The CDN pulls data from the global server periodically and this data is cached on CDN servers to quickly fulfil the data request from the client machine.
Read: Top 10 Backend Frameworks for Web Development in 2020
Most Popular Backend tech stack
The trending mobile and web applications are designed in such a way that most of the application processing is done with backend and little processing is done on the end user’s device to make it accessible all types of computing devices. In short, the applications developed in this era heavily rely on backend hence choosing the right tech stack derives the development speed and performance to a very large extent. Here are some of the most popular languages to develop backend:
Java
Java was developed, maintained and released by oracle in 1995. It is an object-oriented programming language that is most popular in the world as it offers great features in developing high-security web applications. Since it is quite old and was developed by a large tech corporation, a huge community was evolved. The tons of open source libraries available in java fast track the backend application development beyond anyone’s imagination.
Node Js
Node js was launched less than a decade ago but it is built on top of JavaScript and NPM libraries. Node js is also object-oriented programming language that offers blazingly fast performance but quite fewer security features as compared to java. Hence it must be there in our backend developer roadmap for 2020.
Laravel
Laravel is an opensource framework of PHP and it is based on the symphony. Laravel follows MVC (Model View Controller) architecture pattern Laravel offers robust job processing with database ORM, fast routing engine and many more features. Although the security of Laravel is not as good as java these days it is as popular as node js.
.Net
.Net is a programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is as reputable as java but offers less open source and more proprietary libraries to speed up the development process. Due to the dependency on proprietary code developers usually do not find .Net suitable for small scale projects.
Python
Python is one of the oldest programming languages from the incarnation era of C and java. Although the syntax to write python was easy for developers and the language grew steadily year on year but it could not gain fame. The era of data science and artificial intelligence has poured the elixir to its soul which fetched immense popularity among developers. Hence it is among the leaning path and backend developer roadmap for 2020.
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on rails provides a tool to developers for providing structure to all the code they write. Ruby on Rails is an open-source server-side web application framework. Rails is an MVC (model-view-controller) framework that providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standard documents such as JSON or XML for data transfer and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for user interfacing.
Version Control System
While writing the code developers have to try integrating different functionalities which might mess up previously written codes hence a version control system was required. Git is one of the most widely used code versioning tool among developers that they must use.
Repository Hosting Service
Local and remote team collaboration was required among developers on big software projects hence code repository hosting services came into existence. The repositories offer a shared cloud server with code version control to users where they can push their code. Bitbucket and GitHub are the two most widely used services with which a developer must get familiarized.
Architectural Patterns
Architectural patterns have been evolving ever since the birth of programming languages we have travelled from single tier architecture to multitier architecture then we moved into the era of service-oriented architecture, microservices and serverless deployments. Although covering all of them is not possible in a single blog but we will do our best within a couple of lines.
Service-Oriented Architecture
The service-oriented architecture is a software design in which application components communicate with services through APIs. An SOA service is a sandboxed discrete functionality that’s updated and acted upon independently. SOA is the core foundation for web application development.
Monolithic and Microservices architecture
Serverless architecture
You can have a look at some more architectural patterns here.
Design Patterns
Code design patterns are well researched and practiced strategies in code structuring which helps developers to easily modify and scale up software application’s modules and classes. Here’s a list of some design patterns with links to some good blogs on them.
12. Flyweight Design Pattern
13. Prototype Design Pattern
14. Abstract Factory Pattern
15. Bridge Design Pattern
16. Builder Design Pattern
17. Chain of Responsibility Design Pattern
Message Brokers
A message broker is an intermediary software module that provides interface engine for sending and receiving messages over computer networks. RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, JBOSS messaging and AWS Kinesis are some most popular message brokers that are used in mobile and web applications for communicating with text messages. For more details, you can follow the wiki link.
We hope this blog helps aspiring backend developers in 2020. Please do let us know if you like our blog and want us to write on a specific topic.