🚀Entering Tech #026: How to become a backend engineer

Some trivia before we begin. Answers are at the bottom of this newsletter. 

The last edition of #EnteringTech🚀 featured frontend designers and how they make magic with HTML and CSS.

In this week’s edition, let’s talk about backend engineering and how it’s quite different from frontend. 

While frontend engineers are concerned with making apps and websites usable for everyday people like me and you, backend engineers are the ones in charge of making sure everything you interact with actually works. 

💡 Think about it this way. Frontend engineers make buttons you can click on, but backend engineers are the ones that ensure that the links you’re clicking on work. They ensure that when you save something on Google Drive, it goes to the right folder, or that when you search for something on WhatsApp, you find what you’re actually looking for.

Backend engineers use code to connect servers, applications, and databases that deliver information to users. Backend developers determine how things work.

💡 Here’s another quick example: backend engineers are the ones who wrote the algorithm or code that keeps bringing you videos you like on TikTok. Remember every time Instagram or Twitter crashed? It’s because something at the backend broke! Here’s an even better example: the Game of Thrones characters like Jon Snow and Danaerys Targaryen or the places like Winterfell and King’s Landing are the frontend of the show. But the writers, producers and colossal disappointments like David Benoiff and D.B Weiss who are in charge of the storytelling i.e. who dies and who goes to war are the backend. They drive direction!

Here’s what we can say: it’s not pretty and that’s because they do a lot of stuff.

Most backend engineers build the skeletal software of an app or a website and develop the application programming interface (API) of any software. Others are cloud engineers who build digital infrastructure so you can save things on the internet—or the cloud—instead of on your hard drive. 

💡 Remember, all applications and websites are in code and code is the language of computers, so backend engineers write in code and tell computers what to do, like what should happen when someone clicks a button, or which function should occur when we swipe left on our phones.

Like frontend, backend has many languages for building apps and websites. The most popular are:

• C++ which was used to build the Microsoft Office Suite.
• Java which was used to build Spotify and Twitter.
• Python used in Instagram, Dropbox and Pinterest.
• PHP used in Facebook, Wikipedia and WordPress.
• Ruby on Rails which was used in Spotify, and 
• GoLang, notably used on Google and Uber.

There are hundreds of other backend languages and new ones are being developed every day. To become a backend engineer, you’ll have to start by learning one language and working your way up to as many languages as you want. 

Each language has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, many engineers say Java and C++ are verbose and complex, even though they are widely used, and as such it’s easy to find solutions to any problem. PHP, on the other hand, is relatively easy to learn but it has security issues and performs poorly. 

Most developers know three languages and stop there so they can master the three. You don’t have to learn many languages to be a backend engineer. Omeiza Owuda, software engineering manager at Big Cabal Media, says that it’s mastering the languages—or quality—that matters, not quantity. 

👨🏾‍💻 Hardware

To learn backend engineering, you’ll need a laptop. Here are the minimum requirements we found online: 

• a Core i3 or i5 processor 
• 8 GB RAM
• 256 GB SSD; and
• Screen resolution of 1366 X 768 pixels.

Remember, you don’t need a MacBook Pro or triple monitor screens just yet.

🖥️ Software

The basic tool for backend development is a good code editor and there are many code editors out there.

There’s Visual Code Studio and Chrome Developer Tools which are some of the most popular.

The more you learn about backend languages, the more you’ll discover which tools are critical and which are just aesthetics—like Nigeria’s claim to the “giant of Africa” title. 

My Startup in 60 Seconds

In this episode of My Startup in 60 Seconds, Gugulethu Siso talks about her startup Thumeza and how it’s solving a $168-billion-dollar problem in the logistics sector.

Watch the 1-minute YouTube Short here!