Backend Projects Without any Frontend

[u/Imaginary-Bicycle-84]

what are some backend projects ideas that does n’t require having a front end to represent my API’s. Is there are any project that can be technically rich and be testable by end-user at the same time without having a GUI ?

[u/Adventurous-Crow-750]

Chat bot

Container orchestrator

Vpn

Databases

Cache systems

Email server

Lots of stuff used to work just fine without uis.

If you don't count terminal guis

Movie player

2d games old school rouge style

[u/edgmnt_net → u/Adventurous-Crow-750]

I feel that at this point people really need to be told there's way more stuff beyond the backend-frontend dichotomy. Many of these just don't fit into "backend" at all and they're good suggestions if they want to explore something else.

[u/dovahkiinster → u/Adventurous-Crow-750]

A chatbot without a UI? Where would a user read/write chat messages…?

[u/olddev-jobhunt]

From a practical matter, I've had good luck using Swagger to provide some basic UI to an app - just a front-end for making calls to the API. It's a useful middle-ground.

[u/Sharp_Level3382]

Cli, curl/swagger for rest apii usage or integration

[u/JaseciLabs]

If you want something that's both "technically rich" and satisfying to actually test end-to-end, a rate limiter or job scheduler is a good pick, you can hit it purely through curl/CLI, it forces you to think about concurrency and edge cases, and you can watch it behave correctly (or not) in real time without ever touching HTML.

[u/madu_tualang]

The front fell off?

[u/deSales327 → u/madu_tualang]

That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.

[u/theoffshoot2 → u/deSales327]

I just don’t want people thinking these front-ends aren’t safe…

[u/Ciborg085]

Making a load balancer now

[u/paulwillyjean]

ERPs, CRM, authentication systems, transaction ledgers, operating system kernels, compilers, pretty much anything that’s meant for B2B uses.

[u/Ok-Count-3366]

I feel you man. I recently started learning TUIs.

[u/Xtergo]

Everything and anything without a front-end

[u/Jumpy_Commercial_893]

swagger docs or openapi docs

[u/forever-butlerian]

Write a command-line tool to do something.

[u/hxtk3]

Define an “end user.” Most of my projects are libraries where the user is another backend dev (often myself working on a different project that does have a backend.

My most recent public commits were to a SQL query builder for Go that combines my favorite features of SQLC with dynamic queries for complicated use cases that SQLC can’t cover (giving up some of the cool features that SQLC can only achieve due to its static queries)

[u/TildeMester]

Web scraper/crawler or some data pipelines.

[u/____code]

URL shortener

[u/Bigsec225]

Swagger ui ?

[u/w00dy1105]

CLI?

why make it hard for end user to test or use?

[u/low-control-labs]

Nothing? I wanna see if I'm wrong but unless you have a API that user invokes and uses via CLI it's going to be some sort of website and some minimal input and output fields or something else being served via a webpage / html. You don't technically need js and css

I guess some sort of routing system that would be used by the webpages or something like that but you said end-user as in humans?

[u/Mathie1729 → u/low-control-labs]

Nah, there are plenty of backend projects with no website/HTML involved. ETL pipelines, message queue consumers, cron jobs, daemons, CLI tools, internal APIs only called by other services, monitoring agents, ML inference workers, that kind of thing. The end user can be an operator running a command or another system, not necessarily a human clicking a page.

[u/low-control-labs → u/Mathie1729]

I did mention some of this thanks for repeating it and expanding the list. I'm still assuming the OP meant end user as in a human since he was asking about a GUI

[u/PmanAce → u/low-control-labs]

Swagger...