What is Back end Development?

Front end development involves what a user sees on the screen when they open a specific URL owned by you. Even in a completely static environment (with only HTML/CSS), when someone opens a website, some server on the planet needs to respond to you with those HTML and CSS files.

That server is just a computer, just like the one you use yourself to browse the internet. But it has been tuned for performance, and doesn’t have unnecessary components like a mouse or keyboard attached. And it sits with tons of other computers probably in a data warehouse.

Programming those computers in some special way is called back end development.

You may think that backend development is called what it is because it runs behind the user’s back. A visitor to your website never really “accesses” the back end completely. They just communicate with your server, either directly through ports for very limited access (like transferring HTML/CSS files) or not even that – buried deep under CDNs or firewalls (like Cloudflare).

Is front end programming knowledge required for the back end?

Back end development, as mentioned above, involves the programming of a computer sitting probably on the other side of the planet responsible for responding to what your users say from their own computers.

If you’re a full-time back end developer, you do not really need to care about what goes on inside those HTML, CSS and JavaScript files you send to the user’s browser. Instead, you’ve to focus more on the performance of the server, the server code, and throughput.

What goes into back end development?

Good knowledge about a programming language in which you can write HTTP servers. Examples: C#, Java, Node, PHP, Python, etc. (there are many!)

Manage to host using cPanel (traditional) or using bash terminal (cloud hosting/traditional)
Working with Version Control Systems (VCS) like git for managing and deploying builds