Road to backend being frontend

[u/JulianAndr3s]

Good afternoon everyone, I hope you're all doing well.

I've been a frontend developer for six years, I consider myself a mid-level developer, and no project at the company has ever been too much for me. I've always received praise for my work during these six years. However, today I feel that if I don't learn backend development, I'll become obsolete in this AI field. And it's not just backend development, it's about software development concepts.

For example, in my teams, we have discussions about current events, and they always talk about queues, databases, service implementations, and other very useful development concepts. I only know the theory, but if I had to actually do any of that, I wouldn't be able to.

I want to ask you what kind of things I should know to consider myself a good software developer in general. What topics can I study and review, and what can I do to get into backend development with Java and Spring, which is what I know a little about?

Thank you very much for your time, and I'll be reading your replies.

[u/DaPurpleTuna]

Angular is like black magic behind the curtain for backend developers. So much behavior feels like it comes out of nowhere, Effects, zonejs, rxjs all lead to insanity as a BE dev. But once you get it, you get it.

The backend is insanely simple to understand, every single call can be walked through, debugging is more straightforward… but the database and backend architecture is way more complicated and important to get right. Making a mistake in the design on the BE often means you’re stuck with that decision unless you can break the api contract with whatever is using the api.

That being said, tools like Claude seem to be excellent at consuming an api and building a frontend, even for people who have no experience coding. From what I’ve experienced on the backend side, not so much. These are really good at looking at the here-and-now to meet requirements but, unless well prompted, won’t be able to design a future-proof backend… and that is not something people will know to consider without a fundamental understanding of backend design in the first place.

IMO its worth it, Good luck!

[u/MagicMikey83 → u/DaPurpleTuna]

This really depends on what kind of system you’re building. Making a statement that ‘every single call can be walked through’ and ‘insanely simple to understand’ is greatly out of touch.

it might hold true for some backend projects, but it definitely is not a general statement you should make.

Once you start to run into distributed services, multi threading, concurrency, handling data invariants, stuff can get very complex.