The Backend Developer Roadmap
I want this blog series to serve as a testament to my journey down Kamran Ahmed’s roadmap to becoming a backend developer. For those interested, you can see this roadmap here. As well as a link to his twitter account found here. Thank you Kamran. We may have never met, but, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to create this roadmap.
A Little About Me
My name is David Viodes and I am a full-stack web developer, software engineer, computer guru… whatever you’d like to call me. I have recently, within the past 2 months, graduated from a coding boot camp called Lambda. Upon graduating, I have been constantly asking myself what I should be learning next. After a few weeks of not learning anything because I was too busy debating what I should be learning next, I stumbled upon Kamran Ahmed’s roadmap to becoming a backend developer. I looked it over, thought about it, liked it, and ultimately decided I would start at the very beginning and work my way through. I decided I would follow every single one of his suggestions in order, save the topics marked as “Order in roadmap not strict (Learn anytime)” for the end, and write a blog series about it to keep myself honest and motivated to see it through. So, now that the background is out of the way, let’s get started. Shall we?
Topics I Will Cover
Alright if you were too lazy to click on the link up top then I’ll break the roadmap down for you here so everyone knows what’s coming.
- Internet
- Basic Frontend Knowledge
- OS and General Knowledge
- Learn a (Backend) Language
- Version Control Systems
- Relational Databases
- More About Databases
- Learn About APIs
- Caching
- Web Security Knowledge
- Testing
- CI/CD
- Design and Development Principles
- Search Engines
- Containerization vs Virtualization
- Building for Scale
- Message Brokers
- GraphQL
- Graph Databases
- Web Sockets
- Web Servers
Rules Of Engagement
Alright, now that everyone should be familiar with the overarching topics I will be covering along my journey, we should talk about other expectations I am setting for myself. As for the nature of the beast, some of these topics will be tougher than others for me to learn about and cover. Plus, as we all know, we are living this thing called life and it can sometimes get in the way. That being said, I am going to shoot for 1 new blog post a week. I want that to be my absolute maximum amount of time. Now, if I find a topic to be especially easy, I can post about it sooner rather than later. So, 1 post a week is my minimum viable product.
Like I said before, I am going to be following Kamran Ahmed’s roadmap IN ORDER except for the topics marked “Order in roadmap not strict (Learn anytime)”. I will save those for last. Let’s look at an example just to be sure everyone is on the same page. Learn About APIs has 6 topics total, 3 are recommended and 3 have the “not strict” marking. I will learn the 3 that are recommended first, then the 3 that are “not strict”, and then I will move onto Caching.
Finally, the topics marked as “Alternative Option” I will be skipping in this blog series. I will be learning the options that Kamran has suggested himself and will not be exploring the alternative options for time's sake. That being said, if anyone sees an alternative option that they genuinely feel I should learn and would be mad that I skipped… well, I’m sorry. I will get to it eventually there is just a lot on this roadmap.
Finally, finally, I will link any resources I happen to find or that help me along the way. I want this to help others learn as well. However, I do recognize that I am truly a baby in this world of programming, and the way I come to understand some of these topics may not be correct. I do encourage anyone that sees mistakes in my understanding to call me out because the ultimate goal of this is to learn, and I would rather not learn these topics incorrectly. Please let me know if I am not understanding something right. A link to my Twitter can be found here. Thank you all and I will be posting soon with my first topic on my roadmap to victory!
Table Of Contents
Part 1: Internet
Part 2: Basic Frontend Knowledge
- vol. 1: HTML
- vol. 2: CSS (coming soon…)
- vol. 3: JavaScript (coming later but still soon…)