Shadowing Practice: Complete Roadmap for Backend Software Engineers (START HERE!) - Learn English Speaking with Video

Welcome.

This video is going to give you a step-by-step roadmap to becoming a back-end software engineer.

So not only will this tell you what tech to learn, but it will give you the order in which you should learn it.

So if you have no idea where to start, this is going to take you from where you are right now to the end goal of becoming that back-end engineer.

Now we're going to start by looking at this mind map I created.

Do not fret.

This is not the roadmap.

You do not need to know everything inside of this map.

In fact, you can't even see it.

There's so many things on here.

But if I zoom in, you'll notice that there's themes of different categories and then a bunch of different technology you might encounter.

It might be a good idea to become familiar with these different things, but you don't necessarily have to know every item in this list.

Instead, you should pick one item out of each category and become an expert in it.

So you start by understanding the landscape and what exists out there, but then you narrow in and you become really good at one of those things.

And that's where you're probably going to spend 80% of your time

and then maybe 20% of your time understanding the context of everything.

So understanding the different technologies you might encounter.

That's my general framework for learning.

So what this video is going to do is it's going to give you some example items

that you could start to learn with.

Although if you substituted one of these items with another item from the same category, it still might work.

This is just an example roadmap that I would recommend if you really have no idea where to start.

Now the roadmap is actually at the bottom of this mind map.

So if want to get access to this mind map

and roadmap i'll have a link for that down below and

if you want more direct help me guiding you through this

process with one-on-one mentorship i do have a mentorship program so

if you want to learn more about that that's basically going to give you

that accountability and it will help you build the skills

and the things you need to know for your career

so you can be successful as a software developer

so going through this mind map is a great place to start

but if you want that extra help then check out the mentorship program

so So the secret here is to not learn everything, but rather learn a technology from each category.

This will give you experience in the end-to-end, while also giving you something to compare every other technology against.

So if you're really, really good at the Python programming language, you can compare other languages to that language,

so you don't have to have as much of a struggle learning new languages.

You just think of how it's different than what you already know.

That same idea is going to apply to a lot of different tech.

So we'll start at the very basics, which is the operating system.

You should become pretty comfortable with your operating system.

So you should start to learn the commands to use

and just be competent in working with different tools on that operating system.

Now, I develop on a Mac, but it's often the case, especially within backend engineering, you're going to be deploying to Linux.

So I recommend you learn your primary operating system, Mac, Windows, or Linux, but also make sure you learn Linux.

So if you've been wondering if you should do that, yes.

The answer is yes, you should learn Linux, learn the basic commands.

And if you're on Windows and you want to start to become more familiar with Linux, here's a couple of things you could do.

So to start, you can look into WSL, which is going to give you some of the essential Linux capabilities on Windows.

Another option is to install a different type of terminal.

So if you, for example, download Git, you have the option to include a Git Bash program, which will use MinGW you.

So if that is all foreign language to you, go download Git.

That's going to give you a terminal, which will give you some of the essential terminal commands that you would experience on Linux.

And then the third option, which is going to give you the most one-to-one experience, is to actually just use a Linux operating system.

And you can do this within a virtual machine, or you could, of course, install Linux directly on the hardware, but I would probably just go with a VM and get some experience there.

When you deploy something to a backend server, you're going to need to understand these basic commands because if you need to connect to the server, you're likely going to use SSH,

and this is going to be a connection through the terminal.

So if you want to be able to work with the computer, you'll need to know how to do that in the terminal.

This would include learning the basics of a terminal-based text editor.

So next on here, the editor, I recommend generally VS Code, but since you might on occasion be working in a terminal,

you might want to learn the basics of something like Vim.

But in terms of actually working with code to build applications, your day-to-day editor.

I personally use VS Code.

If you have a preference here, this is the kind of thing where this roadmap is an example.

Feel free to substitute it for another item.

I'm just warning you against trying to learn all of the items.

I like VS Code because you can develop pretty much anything inside of it, and you don't have to have five different IDEs, one for each major language you're working on, for example.

That'll help you get better in VS Code.

That's the tool you use to develop so you're going to become more efficient

and just a better developer even

if you're not directly getting better at a programming language getting better at the tools

and the things you use will help you become a better developer as well.

So that's the basics the next thing you should learn is source control

or version control and for this you're going to want to learn git

and I recommend using it in the terminal to become familiar with those commands

and then you can host your repositories in GitHub.

GitHub is a service where we can host our code.

Git is just a software you can install to help you manage and organize your code, keeping track of any changes you make to that code.

You will definitely want to use Git for all of your projects.

I recommend to everybody that they put all of their projects in GitHub for organizational sake, as well as showing activity as a developer.

Here's all the stuff I've been working on.

Even if the code sucks, It's just a matter of showing that you're working on something.

And most likely, if you don't put your code up on GitHub, five years down the road, you're going to lose that project.

You're going to wish you had it.

So if you start tracking all of your stuff now and getting it up on GitHub, you'll thank yourself in the future.

Next up, backend language.

So pick a programming language.

If you're not sure which one to go with, I would recommend Python.

I say Python because it's fairly easy to learn.

Working on web projects is really simple in Python.

and Python can do a whole lot of other stuff.

So it's a very good general purpose language.

Obviously, there are other languages you can use for this.

So you might use JavaScript and TypeScript.

That would be fine.

But if you're unsure, then I would recommend starting with Python.

I have a six hour Python video on YouTube as well as a seven hour part two.

So if you want a little bit of Python material, you can check that out.

I also have a Python mastery course, which is going to be a lot more information.

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and it includes like nine hours of backend Python material.

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So that's going to be a lot of applied Python for building backend services.

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So if you're interested in that course, I will have a link to that down below as well.

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So the programming language gives you the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want.

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You can code anything.

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But if you specifically want to build something like an API or some backend for a website, doing that from scratch could take a lot of work.

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So because of that, it's often the case that backend frameworks exist, which is really just a software library that other people have invested their time,

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skill, and energy into to make building web applications a lot easier.

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So every major programming language is going to have at least one backend framework you could use to start building websites.

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Some are going to have a lot of options, and you'll have to choose which backend framework to start with.

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In the case of Python, there are a couple out there you might have heard of Flask, Django, FastAPI.

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And I would just recommend if you're going to pick one of those, pick Django.

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Django gives you a ton of features and capabilities out of the box.

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It's going to help you learn larger scale backend development, and it will give you conventions and structure.

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So you're not just left with an empty Python file saying good luck.

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It will give you some starting points on how to structure your projects.

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And this will help you start to build larger scale backend systems.

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Now, if you're going to be working with data, which most likely you are, you're going to want to start familiarizing yourself with databases.

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The question is, which database do you use?

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I'm going to recommend you start with Postgres.

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There are a ton of different databases out there, and they're generally categorized as SQL databases or SQL databases, which are structured in tables,

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or NoSQL databases, which could be graphs or key value pairs, documents.

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There's a bunch of different variations for NoSQL databases.

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Most likely, you can cover all of your needs with Postgres, and if needed, you can have a JSON column

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which will allow for semi-structured data where you can vary the values in that data.

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So Postgres is going to give you the foundation that will work in 99% of cases.

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It's also open source and free to use for commercial use, so it's a great starting point.

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And if you learn Postgres, switching to any other structured database is going to be super easy.

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So do not get caught up on the technology.

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Same with, for example, the framework or the language.

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learning the first and getting really good at it is the most important thing.

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Then if for some reason you have to switch to something else, you will have a foundation that will make it a lot easier.

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A lot of the same paradigms are going to be applied.

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So you might follow particular design patterns or structures.

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Those are going to also exist in other frameworks and languages.

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So do not stress, just pick something and get really good at it.

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Next up, we're going to talk about how do you go from Django to connecting to a database such as Postgres.

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and this is going to be done in a few different ways.

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Most likely you're going to start with an ORM.

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So an ORM is an object relational mapper

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and that's going to make it easier to work with a database because you'll just be working with objects in your code.

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You're not using any SQL, you're just using Python or whatever language that's in

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and the library is going to do all of the SQL for you and give you the objects you need.

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So that's an ORM, you should become familiar with least one

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so the django orm is fine you should also learn raw sql

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so working with the database directly all of the databases will

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have different tools for connecting to them most likely you can

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just start by connecting to the database from the terminal so

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if you're in postgres you can learn a little bit about psql there are also often extensions

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and softwares you can use to visualize the database

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so you can look at pgadmin and i think visual studio code also has some extensions for Postgres.

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It's handy to know that raw SQL, if you're limited to just using an ORM, you're going to have a painful time as a backend developer.

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And I would say this is one of the areas that will distinguish you from a full stack developer.

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It's often the case that a full stack developer will just know the ORM layer, at least a beginner full stack developer.

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They'll often basically think of the data layer as the last thing that they should worry about.

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And they prioritize the functionality of the web pages.

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And while that's important, I would flip that

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and say you should probably prioritize the data layer

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because think of the potential consequences if you build an application and you mess something up there, right?

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You could have a data leak, you could have security issues.

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These should not be an afterthought.

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So if you prioritize getting really good at SQL and the data layer, you're going to set yourself apart from a lot of the developers

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that are just average in a bunch of technologies because they spread themselves thin

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trying to learn the full stack from the beginning.

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For those of you who've been following this channel for a while, I started with database design and I think starting with the databases is what has helped me tremendously in my career.

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Next up, we have the front end.

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Huh, should we learn the front end?

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That's a great question because if you're the backend developer, you might not even deal with the front end.

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So if you imagine at one point you will do full stack development, which is very possible, you should at least learn the basics of the front end,

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and specifically starting with the connections between the front end and the back end.

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So learn how to fetch data, retrieving data from an API, as well as learning how to do any transformations you need. If necessary,

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say the structure in the back end is a little bit different than how you might use it in the front end, learn how you can do those transformations.

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I would recommend if you want to start working on some front end stuff.

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Don't prioritize too much the design with the CSS and the HTML.

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While it's all important, I think you should first prioritize accessing data from the backend

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and then potentially creating an SDK or some functions to make that very easy.

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So if in the front end, you just had a function in JavaScript that was like get users, that could give you a good practice exercise of getting data from the backend

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and making it very easy to use on the front end.

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So it's often the case you'll be working with some front end frameworks such as React.

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So you can learn how to do this stuff in React, or you can use many of the other tools out there

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that exist for basically synchronizing the front end and the back end, such as React Query or Redux Toolkit Query.

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So check out those tools if you want to get started in that.

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So now you have a pretty good idea of the full stack.

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You might not be a full stack developer because you're prioritizing the back end, but you have an idea of how things are all connected, and you're not completely useless at the front end.

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You don't want to be an expert at all this other stuff and then be like, what's an HTML?

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I've never heard of that.

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So at least know the basics of front end.

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Next up, we have communication, which is pretty broad.

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So let's expand on this.

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Here are a few different ways apps can communicate.

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Basically, transferring data from the back end to the front end.

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So we already talked about REST.

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This would be the API.

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So retrieving data from the back end and making it usable on the front end.

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Next up, let me talk about Webhooks, which flips this around.

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It's an interesting technology or approach that will basically be a broadcast instead of someone making a request.

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So if you have something happen on your backend and you want to let people know about it, you can learn more about webhooks.

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These are often used for software integration.

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So if you're working with some kind of application and you want to receive notifications from that software, when you're trying to integrate with the service,

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they might have the ability for you to provide a webhook endpoint, which will receive information when something happens.

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Just as a completely random example, here is something from the Stripe docs you can receive Stripe events in your webhook endpoint.

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You might want your application to receive events as they occur in your Stripe accounts

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so that your backend systems can execute actions accordingly.

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So it's kind of like a flipped API where you can

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receive updates instead of having to constantly request something from the Stripe API to see if some changes have been made.

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It's set up pretty much the same way.

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You would just create a post endpoint on your backend and give that URL to some service such as Stripe.

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So I put that one in here as it might be something handy to know if you want to start connecting services.

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Now WebSocket is a bi-directional connection between the client and the server.

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So in REST, you can only take requests from the client and then give a response.

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With WebSockets, you can actually deliver something to the client without waiting for a request.

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Once that WebSocket connection is made, it's maintained, and either the client or the server can then communicate to the other one.

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This is used for real-time web applications, so if you want to, for example, create a chat application,

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a video game that might have players interacting with one another in real time, these are all different things you can do with WebSockets.

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Definitely a valuable skill to know as a back-end developer.

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As mentioned, it does go into front-end some because the client in this scenario is going to be the browser.

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And that's pretty typical.

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It's not going into the design of the front end.

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And that's what I would kind of avoid at first when you're trying to become a competent backend developer.

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So worry about data and communication.

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Next up on this list, we got notations.

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This is really simple.

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JSON, Markdown.

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If you've done any development, you're probably familiar with these.

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But JSON is a notation

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that you'll often use with REST APIs very simple key value pairs

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and pretty much just looks like a JavaScript object with some

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minor differences such as the keys being quoted markdown is a notation language for documentation even

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if you're not writing docs you'll probably want to know the basics of markdown

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because you should have a readme showing how to set up your projects

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and run them locally

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so the readme.md is going to use a markdown this is

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really easy to learn you can learn the basics in 60 seconds I have a YouTube short

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which covers 80% of the things you're going to use with markdown next up we have protocols

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so the ones you should be familiar with to start https

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and ssh https is hypertext transfer protocol secure

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and this is where you will become familiar with tls certificates

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or you'll likely just hear ssl certificates this is something you'll

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have to do to create the https connection for your services

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so not only when they visit the front end

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but the connection between the front end and the back end

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so you want to learn the basics of how to do that And as for SSH, we already talked about that a little bit.

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You'll be using that if you need to remote into any servers.

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There are a lot more protocols, but this is a good starting point.

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Next up, we have testing.

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We can start with Postman and Swagger.

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We talk a little bit more about automated testing and CICD integration in the MindMap video.

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So if you wanted to refer to that.

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But these are two good tools to start with

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that allow you to easily build and document APIs and give you really easy ways to test them.

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So within Postman, you can make a collection and you can run through that collection, checking to make sure you get all the expected results.

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And it has some automated testing capabilities.

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So you can script that out, hit run, make sure everything is working.

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So if you change stuff, you can confirm you don't have any major regressions.

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Swagger is an interesting tool because it will give you a web page with a list of all the different API endpoints.

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And you can invoke those from the web page.

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great documentation tool but really handy for testing

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because you can just go in there hit run

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and confirm you get the result you expect it'll also give you the expected structure for the API endpoints

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so if any stakeholders need to test the API they can very easily

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or you in six months who doesn't remember what you're supposed

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to send to an API you can just check the swagger

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endpoints here's a very basic pet store example where you can see all the different endpoints

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and you can go in here

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and for example get a store inventory try it out hit execute

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and get a result for stuff that takes data it'll give you the structure

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that you will send in a post request so

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when you try it out you can go in here

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and provide values for these things

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and then hit execute it'll also give potential issues such as a 405 invalid input

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so it basically gives a good overview of the way your API works, which can be great for other people who might be using your API.

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So those are two good testing tools.

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Next up, we have cloud providers.

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A couple of things here.

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I guess I lied.

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Just one thing here, AWS.

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I originally said a couple of things

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because I thought maybe there would be Vercel or Netlify or one of these other platforms as a service companies.

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Those are great to learn and a great place to start.

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But as a backend engineer, I would probably encourage you to learn one of the infrastructure companies such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and there's other ones,

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but those are the main three because that is going to give you complete control, pretty big learning curve, but if you want to become a better back-end developer,

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I'm going to try and push you past the resistance to learn the platform.

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Just go into AWS, start to dork around with it, and become familiar with it.

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This is something people can dedicate their entire career to, so it is overwhelming, just know that going into it, it'll take some time to start to become familiar.

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Next up, we have containerizing.

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So you could put your applications in Docker containers.

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So you'll want to learn Docker, Docker Compose for basically a very simple orchestration.

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And then you could also find a place to store your images, such as Elastic Container Registry from AWS.

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So you don't have to containerize your applications to start, but you may want to become familiar with that, as you'll probably run into that if you're working as a professional developer.

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There's ups and downs to using Docker.

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It can be simpler in certain scenarios if you know the commands to use.

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So what I recommend if you go down the route of learning Docker, start to take notes of all the commands you use so that you don't have to think and memorize everything.

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You can just refer to those to set up your application and get it running.

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And you're not lost because you have this new layer of abstraction.

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so definitely spend some time studying containerization

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if that's something you're going to end up using I put question marks here

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because they're kind of optional but I would say

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if you get this far in this list you should start

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learning these things CI CD continuous integration continuous deployment this is going to allow you to tie into your repository

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and have the latest code automatically deploy you can also do a bunch of other stuff like automated testing

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or creating images or scanning the source code for any issues.

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Tons of different things you can do.

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So you might want to start familiarizing yourself with a CICD pipeline.

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There are a lot of different ones out there.

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I put code pipeline here.

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And the reason I put that there is because for all of the technologies, I am basically just saying,

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hey, learn the AWS version of the software so you start to become familiar with AWS as a whole.

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But there are other very popular tools out there.

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GitHub Actions is a big one.

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So you might want to look at that if you're using that at work, or if you're familiar with that already.

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But if you're in the AWS ecosystem, you can pretty much do everything.

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They have a service for everything you'd ever possibly want to do.

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So you got the container registry, you have the CICD pipeline, you have the hosting, everything you need.

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It may kind of tie you into that AWS system.

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But again, as I mentioned, once you learn one of these things, it's so much easier to learn another.

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So if you're already familiar with all the services in AWS that you would likely use, if you needed to switch to Azure or Google Cloud Platform or some individual technology for some of these,

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such as GitHub Actions, you could totally do that without a lot of difficulty.

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Next up, we have hosting.

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And here is basically some more specific stuff as for where the server is ran and where the static files go.

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So I didn't just put AWS, what service specifically are you going to use?

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And I just mentioned three you should be familiar with here, Elastic Beanstalk.

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That's AWS's platform as a service.

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They're going to make it very easy to deploy an application.

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I use very easy in quotes because it's kind of a pain.

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But there's also Fargate, which is probably something you would use if you're containerizing.

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Similar idea to Elastic Beanstalk as well, though.

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And this is an example of something that is serverless, so you don't have to allocate a server with a certain amount of RAM or anything like that.

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You just pay for what you use.

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So those are two different options.

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You can just go direct into EC2, but that might require a little bit more knowledge to get things working.

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But doing that is not going to be a bad idea either.

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Then we have S3.

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That is the storage on AWS.

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So you'll probably use that

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and that's where you would host your front end of the application as well as any files

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So if users are uploading things to your app, you'll need to know how to put those in s3 next up We have CDNs.

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This is a content delivery network This will basically provide different locations

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that your app is cached from So if somebody makes a request

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and they're closer to one of these edge locations They don't

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have to make the request all the way to your main server

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They'll just hit the CDN the big one here is cloudflare

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and this is one scenario where I actually broke my rule of using all AWS stuff.

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CloudFront is the AWS CDN.

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You could totally use CloudFront.

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I've experimented with that.

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I put CloudFlare here because I think that's probably the go-to that most people are going to be familiar with already.

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So you can go with CloudFlare or within AWS CloudFront.

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Next on the list we have monitoring.

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So you can explore things like CloudWatch, PagerDuty.

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This is how you look into your app, make sure things are working the way you would expect, and get notified if anything goes wrong.

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So this is once your app is already in production, so definitely check those out if you need more details on your app.

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Cool.

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Next up, we have issues, issue tracking.

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You just use GitHub, keep it simple, but you might be working in a team environment where you have to use something like JIRA or whatever.

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You probably won't have too much of an issue picking that up.

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I just put it in this list because it was one of the categories from the larger mind map.

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So this is basically some way to keep track of what's going on in your application.

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Not so much the running application, but the code of the application.

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If there's bugs, if there's things that need added, you can do all of that within GitHub.

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Next up, big jump, we have need more.

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So if you manage to make it this far, you're already a pretty proficient developer.

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But if you still want more, you want to advance your career, or you're doing some specialized applications, I'm going to share now some other things you could learn.

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So you really have two paths here.

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You could learn everything up to this point in more depth, or you can learn some more of these technologies.

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I wouldn't go into this need more section though, if you're not already proficient in all of the technologies up to this point.

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So let's explore this.

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I have a few different things here.

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Languages, full stack development, more on communication, no SQL, and more on containerization.

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So let's start with languages.

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I would recommend learning one or two lower level languages.

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So you can learn Rust, Go.

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You might want to learn C++ if that makes sense for the kind of stuff you're working on.

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Although I would say it's less common to be used in more of a web development ecosystem.

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So I've used Rust to build APIs even.

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Probably not something I would use C++ for.

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So I just gave two as an example here, but you know, just explore some different languages.

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And then I would also recommend JavaScript and TypeScript.

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So that's going to be used for the front end and you could also use it for the back end as well.

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This is just the most popular language.

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You're going to want to have a working knowledge of it.

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Now when it comes to full stack, listed a few things here.

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So we have Next.js.

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You could learn how to have static site generation.

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And this is going to have a backend component to it.

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And then as I mentioned earlier, some state management tools such as React Query or RTK Query.

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Next up we have comms.

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So here are some other means of communication.

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You can learn about protocol buffers.

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These are great for inter-app communication or if you have a microservice architecture.

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This is more efficient than JSON as it's serialized as binary.

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So you can't read the transferred message, but you can then deserialize it on the receiving end.

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And that is going to make a more efficient transfer.

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GraphQL is another approach to making APIs.

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It's going to allow the client to basically request data like SQL, where the client can retrieve exactly what it wants.

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So definitely worth learning the basics of GraphQL.

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And you may also be interested in learning a message broker which can be used for inter-app communication such as RabbitMQ.

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Now for databases I mentioned you can use Postgres for most of your scenarios.

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Still think that's true but it's probably something where you might want to learn a couple of the NoSQL databases.

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I listed three here as an example.

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I would say the most important one here would be Redis

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because this is going to be a caching layer for your backend services.

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I would almost even move this to before the need more section.

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So probably out of all of this stuff, I would look into Redis.

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But I think if you get to this point and you haven't learned Redis, you could pick it up pretty easily.

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It's essentially an in-memory database that will improve the overall performance of your app.

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So caching is a whole topic you can study more on with backend engineering.

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It gets pretty complex, but that is probably the first place I would start.

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MongoDB, that's a popular one, and that's why I put it there.

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It's a document database, as is Firebase.

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But Firebase is really popular, and a lot of people will use it basically as a backend as a service.

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So it's something you might want to become familiar with.

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Pretty popular as the backend for mobile applications.

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So definitely check that out if that applies to you.

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There are a ton of NoSQL databases.

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So I just picked a couple as examples.

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I would learn Redis, but then as for the other two, you could pick whatever makes sense for the kind of stuff you're working on.

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And then for containerization, the next logical step is to get into Kubernetes,

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which is an orchestrator, which helps you coordinate all of these different containers and deploy them.

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And for this, you could use a service like EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, inside of AWS.

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This is a step just beyond basic Docker, so definitely worth learning if you'll be using containers heavily in your career.

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So that is the overall structure.

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Yeah, it's a lot, but it's also not that bad.

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Once you start going through this, your rate of learning goes up because you're more familiar with the core principles, which I put a lot of thought into that in the order of this.

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I try to set it up in a way

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that makes the stuff that's over here easier to learn based on the stuff you learned back here.

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Just as a basic example, you know, if you go in and you start SSHing into servers, but you haven't even learned the basics of Linux, you're going to have a hard time.

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I want to reiterate, this is not the only path you can take.

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This is an example path.

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The most valuable thing is just learning the technology a bit deeper and not spreading yourself thin across too many different technologies.

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While, yeah, this is a lot of technologies, they're all in different categories.

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Some people might say, I'm going to become an expert by learning Django, Flask, and FastAPI.

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But by doing that, you're actually just becoming a beginner in three different things.

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So keep your learning path very thin, where you're just learning one or two things from each category so that you're most efficiently using your time.

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To conclude, if you found this useful and you want to use it as a reference, you can get the link to the mind map and roadmap down below.

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And as a reminder, I have the mentorship if you need guidance through this entire process.

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You can definitely do this on your own, but you might lose track of where you are or not really understand how everything fits together.

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If that's the case, you would benefit from the additional mentorship and accountability.

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So I have that in the mentorship program.

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I'll have a link to that as well.

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So check that out if that sounds interesting to you.

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The goal is not just to learn technology, but learn it in such a way that it will help your career or help you land a job.

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And that's what I help people with.

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Thank you so much for watching and if you want to see more backend content, stay tuned.

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See you next time.

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