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Must Know Skills: Backend Developer

Posted on 11/05/202114/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

The backend is the part of a web application that is unrevealed to the user. Unlike front-end, back-end development operations are not very easy and usually turn out to be complicated and manifold; this part is in alignment with the server. Backend operations are a lot different that are controlled by different programming languages like C, C++, Perl, and Ruby. It is a broad field that’s further subcategorized into several levels.

A backend developer usually doesn’t work alone; backend developers usually work in teams of 2 or more people. A team of backend developers contains different specialists that are responsible for their specific discipline. Some are responsible for database management, some work with caching schemes and scripting while some focus on website architecture. Behind every successful website and application, the combined effort of the whole team plays its role. A backend developer’s code bridges the communication between database and browser.

To describe the working of a backend developer in a nutshell, we can say that such a developer mainly focuses on the following:

Web Development Languages
Database and Cache
Server
API (REST & SOAP)

The essential requirement for becoming a backend developer is to have a keen knowledge of at least one server-side programming language.

What is the role of a backend developer?

To understand the skills required to become a backend developer, one needs to analyze what are their responsibilities. Only then we can relate their skills to their roles and responsibilities. The key responsibilities of backend developers are:

They work with front-end developers and provide server-side algorithms of user-facing web application elements. Backend developers code in server-side language to create logic so that web applications function correctly.
Other than coding and creating functional web applications, backend developers also optimize them for increasing response time and efficiency.
They analyze the goals and requirements, handle bugs and errors, and come up with solutions.
They also interact with the database for storing data and ensure that every user has access to what they search.
They also manage APIs that are executed across the devices.
They are also involved in building the architecture of the system.

Backend Developer Skills

To have efficient backend developer skills, one needs to have complete command on the subject. A good developer is aware of every new trend and invention in his domain. He urges to learn and align with all advancements coming his way.

Technology progresses every day. Many innovations are being made, and adapting to modern techniques is imperative to sustaining the game. Luckily in the development domain, a new trend might be complicated in learning, but it is focused on reducing the coding effort. Every new language aims to have minimal syntax, and it is suitable for a developer to invest some time to learn it.

The necessary technical skills required to become a backend developer are:

In-depth knowledge of at least one backend programming language and framework.
Knowledge of front-end technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so that he can communicate with the front-end team.
He should be capable of managing a hosting environment along with the database administration.
He should be capable of scaling applications to handle the load changes.
He should have enough knowledge of accessibility and security compliance.
It’s good for him to have an experience of version control, such as GIT.
A backend developer is not expected to have command on every programming language. That is not possible for a human to have expertise in each of them. But they are expected to be experts in their opted language.

More Backend Developer Skills to add on the resume

1. Web Development Languages: Back-end developers work simultaneously with front-end developers, setting server rationale to outside components of the web application. So as to execute this rationale, the backend engineer utilizes server-side scripting language. The best programming languages that you must know while talking about backend developer skills are:

Ruby: Ruby is a programming language that is utilized accompanied by Rails. Ruby is to Rails as PHP is to Zend, or as Python is to Django. The sheer class and finesse of the language are what attract the back-end developers towards this language and make it a must-have in your tech stack. It prioritizes conventions rather than configuration, which helps the back-end developers as they don’t have to waste their precious development time in configuring the files to start the development process.
Python: Curated by Guido van Rossum and rolled-out in 1991, Python is an interpreted, cutting-edge, general-purpose programming language. It reduces the need of coding to a very significant level and has high utility because of the presence of third-party modules. The ease of use and extensive libraries offer back-end developers more productivity as compared to other programming languages. Not just for building basic applications like desktop apps, Oss, Business Apps, and web frameworks, but Python is also the best fit for AI and ML-based web development.
PHP: PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source back-end scripting language used by developers to build web apps and sites. PHP also has a huge assortment of utilitarian modules and a couple of the modules accessible in PHP incorporate Graphics and PDF, among others. One of the greatest advantages of PHP is that it is very easy to learn and use because of its simple syntax. Anyone who is familiar with C language can easily grasp PHP without any difficulty.
Java: Java is an object-oriented, platform-independent, general-purpose programming language that is designed to have negligible implementation reliance. As a result of Java’s power, convenience, cross-stage capacities, and security highlights, it has become the most preferred language among developers.

2. Comprehensive Knowledge of Databases: Become familiar at stacking and recovering data from databases. Though front end developers can associate with databases and interface with them too, server-side development is right now the standard method to control advantaged and extraordinary access to that information, including storage and recovery. Start with great social style databases, and move towards chart databases as your knowledge permits.

3. Connecting to Application Programme Interface (API): Internet browsers aren’t the only entity to interact with web applications. Regularly, an organization will offer a mobile app for iOS or Android alongside its principal site. There are additionally program based applications that principally utilize JavaScript, not server-side rendered HTML (through structures like React, Vue, or Angular). To recover information for the display, these applications require an Application Programmer Interface, or API to associate with.

HTML might be helpful for designing substance in internet browsers, however, there are greatly improved configurations for information that will be utilized by different projects. The two most mainstream positions for API information are JSON, which represents JavaScript Object Notation, and XML, which represents eXtensible Markup Language.

4. Server Handling: Your site needs a database to deal with all the client and product data. A database stores site content in a structure that makes it simple to recover, arrange, alter, and store information. It runs on a remote PC called a server. There is a wide range of databases that are generally utilized, for example, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres SQL, and SQL Server. For server management you can choose any one of these and acquire an expertise on it: Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx, Node.js, New Relic etc.

5. Knowledge of Popular Frameworks: You must have knowledge of the frameworks identified with your preferred language. For example, on the off chance that you go with Java, you would be required to know Spring, Hibernate, and so on. These are well known Java-based frameworks. Additionally, on the off chance that you go for Python, you would be required to know Flask, Django or some other Python-based framework.

Estimated income of a Backend Developer

According to research, and taking the previous year’s figures into consideration, backend developer trends to earn up to $120,798 per year. This figure could vary based on expertise, experience, skills, and is also dependent on the company, country, and other factors. Also, it is worthwhile to note that there’s a vast difference between the pay-scales of backend developers and front-end developers. Front-end developers aren’t paid as much as backend developers. The reason is that front-end work is mostly done with the help of automated tools, while backend development requires much technical expertise.

What is the future of Backend Development?

As of the current market trends, there are no worthy alternatives to backend developers and backend development. So naturally, the future is very bright for such developers. In this digital age, every business is required to have an online presence, and for that, they require high-quality backend development for their websites. Although many clients are not aware of the difference between backend and front-end still, the market cannot survive without backend developers. Despite technology replacing everything with automation, backend developers have a safe future as they are required for the process of developing automated tools.

Summary

The role of backend developers is critical to web development. They are responsible for all the key roles and ensure the deployment of quality products. That is why more and more aspiring web developers are today opting for this career. Such people should have a passion for coding and possess all the required knowledge and skills to become an efficient developer. It is also necessary to have other additional skills, mentioned above, to make your mark in the market.

Developing App? Here’s Angular Practices & Tips

Posted on 21/01/202114/05/2021 by Anteelo Master

Angular has been the most famous javascript framework among the developer community. It’s an MVC framework which provides pre-built components for developing the software application.Angular(2+) is based on Typescript , which is a superset of JavaScript. It comes with its most important advantage of static type checking that provides compile-time checking for any variable declarations and definitions.This blog is based around some best practices for Angular which I figured out while developing applications. There are also some bonus tips which I believe would help you with Angular development.

Follow the component based approach

Angular comes with the component-based paradigm which is also one of its best practices. It helps in maintaining modular and readable code.

While developing an angular code, if you think that something can be used multiple times as an independent piece of code, make it a component. A very basic example can be a simple dropdown which shows a list of options. The drop-down can act as an independent component with its own methods and template.

Few more examples could be – breadcrumbs for navigating throughout our web application, a simple alert box showing error/success messages or a loader. We tend to ignore these while thinking of modular approach but all these above examples can be thought of as independent components which can be reused over and over again.

Avoid using one huge global CSS

Angular’s current structure includes individual folder for every component. This folder includes-

.ts file for component logic
.html file
.css file for the component

So, keeping all of your CSS in one common CSS file would not only make your code less readable, it would make it less maintainable.

The best approach to style your components is to separate the global CSS with the local CSS (here local CSS refers to the component CSS). You should write your CSS in global CSS only when the CSS is written for the entire application and then if you need to style your component specific to a certain page, you can surely write in the local CSS.

Use CSS preprocessors for faster development

We can also use CSS preprocessors like SCSS/SASS for our Angular projects and I prefer them instead of writing plain CSS as they provide a lot of advantages over writing plain CSS. To mention one, the use of partials so that you can also separate your styles into multiple files for maintainability. If you guys want to know about partials, I would suggest you to go through this link.

You can divide your styling into multiple SCSS files just as we divide our application into multiple components. SCSS/SASS helps in writing smaller code which would ultimately get converted into CSS. So, why not save time and use it to our advantage.

Save your time by using build tools

Tools like angular-cli have come up as a lifesaver for angular developers. It’s basically a boilerplate for an Angular application which helps in quickly setting up the angular application for your new project. It comes with all dependencies required for building your application and also has an inbuilt webpack which helps in bundling all your code and assets. Angular CLI helps to increase developers productivity through scaffolding by creating a component file, template file, stylesheet file etc. It comes with few basic commands which help in faster development like:-

ng g component my-new-component – it will create a new component with the name my-new-component.
ng g service my-new-service – it will create a new service with the name my-new-service.
ng g module my-module – it will create a new module. A module is basically a collection of components which help to serve or attain a particular functionality.

Use ES6 paradigm and approach

Though right now ES-8 is the current drafted version for ECMAScript but ES-6 came up with its own new features that are still widely used by developer community as they produce the same results with fewer lines of code and for best practices, every developer should know how to use them.

Arrow Function – In javascript, we use this keyword to refer to the current execution context. Previously, when we had to write javascript functions, this keyword would refer to the function context and we had to use a temporary variable to store the current execution context, so that we never lose it but with the arrow functions, the current execution context is never lost. For e.g., we could use an arrow function like this;

// ES5

var sum = function(x, y) { return x + y };

// ES6 (arrow function)

var sum = (x, y) => { return x + y };

Now, see the ES6 arrow function is just so compact and easy to understand and we can easily use this keyword inside this function to refer to the current execution context.

Template Literals – Template literals have come up with how we deal with printing strings having dynamic content.

For example, without template literals if we had to print a hello and goodbye message to a person, we would write something like :

const name = ‘AMAL’

console.log(‘Hello ’ + name +’ !’);

console.log(‘Goodbye ‘ + name + ‘ !’);

Now using template literals, it would be something like this:

const name = ‘AMAL’

console.log(`Hello ${name} !`);

console.log(`Goodbye ${name} !`);

Now, who wouldn’t like to use the second syntax as it’s really easy to use and we don’t have to care about putting the spaces at right places so that the formatted output is correct.

Apart from these, const and let keywords came up as a replacement for global var variable so as to enable effective scoping of variables.

For a detailed overview of ES6 features, I would recommend having a glance over this.

Use Lazy Loading wherever possible

Lazy loading is based around loading modules only when you want them to show.

We know about Angular’s modular architecture where a code is divided into modules with each module having its own components.

These components are basically views which might have some dynamic data. These components are rendered with the help of angular routing.

Lazy loading is one of the best things that angular framework comes with.

It’s based around one principle – ‘load/use it when you need it’. Oh, yeah what a lame
explanation I’ve given. There is a routing.ts file in every module which defines a URL for rendering each and every component.

Now when it comes to implementing lazy loading technique, what we do is we define a routing file for each and every module and we import each module only when the URL changes and it corresponds to rendering a component defined in the routing file of that module.

This technique requires a bit of patience to learn but take my words, it’s worth implementing. I can tell you with my personal experience; we reduced the loading time of our website by 3-5 seconds by implementing lazy loading.

Previously, we imported the whole bundle each and every time the user hit our website URL making our site slow while rendering. Then after implementing lazy loading, we only imported the module containing component required to render our index page and we just loaded other modules only based on what URL the user is switching to.

The Angular docs surely cover the lazy loading technique and it’s worth reading. You can check this link to learn more about it.

Follow DRY principle, extensively use services and directives

Services

DRY – This keyword is very famous in the developer community and it just stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself. So, when writing any code- be it Angular or any language- if you feel that you are basically writing or repeating the same code in every component, then you must pause then and there and rethink whether the code can be placed at a suitable place and can be shared by every component.

For example, if you want to call an API that updates user data, don’t call it in every component. What I would do it, I would rather make a service for it in the .service.ts file and would call that function whenever I need any component.

Also, it serves the purpose of using services in angular. Services help us in saving and fetching data and also help us write common functions which could be used by multiple components.

Directives

Now switching over to directives. A directive is a piece of code which is used to perform a specific task. Directives are of 3 types in Angular – component, structure, attribute.

Components are as we all know templates with logic to handle data.
Structure directives modify DOM by adding or removing an element.
Attribute directives change appearance or behavior of an element.

Once, I was wondering to restrict input elements to accept only numbers when a user types in for a phone number field which shouldn’t accept alphabets. For this, I built an only number directive which would only allow input elements to accept numbers through the keycode. So just by using this directive as an attribute on an HTML input element, I can modify/change its behavior.

Conclusion

Following best practice is never a compulsion. There are many ways of doing things and you may choose any path. However, using best practices mean that you are following a method or a technique which is tried and tested through experiments and has proved to be effective to attain desired results.

Tag: #CSS

Must Know Skills: Backend Developer

What is the role of a backend developer?

Backend Developer Skills

More Backend Developer Skills to add on the resume

Estimated income of a Backend Developer

What is the future of Backend Development?

Summary

Developing App? Here’s Angular Practices & Tips

Follow the component based approach

Avoid using one huge global CSS

Use CSS preprocessors for faster development

Save your time by using build tools

Use ES6 paradigm and approach

Use Lazy Loading wherever possible

Follow DRY principle, extensively use services and directives

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

Take a look at our global hideouts.

Contact

India (HQ)

Atlanta, USA

London, UK

Dubai, UAE

Melbourne, Australia

Surabaya, Indonesia

India (HQ)

Atlanta

London

Dubai

Australia

Indonesia

What is the role of a backend developer?

Backend Developer Skills

More Backend Developer Skills to add on the resume

Estimated income of a Backend Developer

What is the future of Backend Development?

Summary

Follow the component based approach

Avoid using one huge global CSS

Use CSS preprocessors for faster development

Save your time by using build tools

Use ES6 paradigm and approach

Use Lazy Loading wherever possible

Follow DRY principle, extensively use services and directives

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

Take a look at our global hideouts.​

Contact

India (HQ)

Atlanta, USA

London, UK

Dubai, UAE

Melbourne, Australia

Surabaya, Indonesia

India (HQ)

Atlanta

London

Dubai

Australia

Indonesia

Take a look at our global hideouts.