How to transition from frontend to backend development: A complete roadmap.

A step-by-step plan to help you become a full-stack engineer by building and deploying projects along the way.

You are a front-end developer who wants to learn and build backend systems and become a full-stack developer.

I am writing a step-by-step guide with topics at each level and projects you should build instead of bombarding you with backend terms and topics.

By following this guide, you will know the important topics at each stage, such as beginner and medium level, and what projects to build to implement theoretical concepts.

At my job, I have trained tens of interns and transitioned front-end developers into back-end engineers.

So, how do we do it?

1. I will first enlist the topics you need to learn and the subtopics. You can use YT boot camps, courses, and books of your own choice, but I have shared my suggestions at the end.

2. A project with implementation will be mentioned at the beginner and intermediate levels so that you know what to build in the beginning.

3. New and slightly advanced concepts will be introduced gradually so that you can learn those and implement them in existing projects.

Before moving ahead, I assume you are already skilled in JavaScript as a front-end developer.

Roadmap

You first need to learn some basic concepts related to backend development. These concepts will remain the same irrespective of the programming language or framework.

General Backend Concepts

1. HTTP/HTTPS

2. SSL/TLS Encryption

3. TCP vs UDP

4. How does the server work?

Overview of APIs

1. What are RESTful APIs?

2. CORS

3. HTTP methods.

4. Status codes

5. Idempotency

6. OpenAPI Specification

7. API payload validation

8. API Versioning

Security

1. Concept of Authentication and Authorization

2. OAuth 2.0: overview, what it is, and how it works?

3. JWT: What it is and how it works?

4. Understanding of Session Cookies

5. HTTP-only cookies

6. Encryption

7. Hashing

By now, you have understood some concepts. Now, let’s move to Node.js to get the hands dirty.

Why choose Node.js to write the first backend code?

As you are already familiar with JavaScript, it will be much easier and convenient to implement the concepts you learn across.

If another programming language is chosen, it will take you some time to learn the syntax and concepts. So, we will skip all those steps here.

Node.js essentials concept

1. Basics of Node.js

2. Spinning up a Node.js server

3. Create an API endpoint, send some dummy JSON responses, and call your first API from Postman.

Congratulations. You have achieved something meaningful now.

Let’s now move to databases.

Database

1. Basics of DB, what it is, etc.

2. Pick MongoDB or PostgreSQL and read a little bit about it.

3. Learn concepts of schemas, relationships, unique constraints, indexing, etc.

4. Overview of commands for operations such as insert, update, delete, and get and play with these in the database console.

5. Add the database to your project; add services for CRUD operations.

Create a basic user management service

Now, we will build a minimal user service to implement the authentication and authorization, encryption, and hashing concepts we have learned.

1. Install JWT in the project.

2. Add an API for creating users and hash passwords and save them in the database.

3. On login, return the JWT.

For read, update, and delete endpoints, create a middleware and verify the JWT.

Build a task to-do list project

1. Design a DB model/schema for your project without taking help from the internet for objects, at least.

2. Create CRUD endpoints for to-do list items and add them to the database.

3. Implement middleware for payload validation and authorization.

4. Implement sign-up and sign-in support.

Congratulations! You have built the basic backend of an app that can be integrated with the frontend.

Before moving ahead, build a lot of APIs using the stuff you have learned so far. Some of the projects are:

1. URL shortener

   1. CRUD APIs.

   2. Dashboard for analytics

2. Expense tracker

After building these projects, I hope that you have fully grasped the basic concepts.

Now, we will move ahead and learn some new concepts on top of existing knowledge.

APIs

1. GraphQL APIs and comparison with RESTful ones.

2. Rate-limiting and throatling-related concepts and implementations

3. Pagination & filtering

4. RBACs: Role-Based Access Controls

Architectural Patterns

1. concurrency, parallelism and Multi-threading

Caching

1. Concepts of caching

2. Strategies such as Cache-Aside, Write-Through, Write-Behind, Read-Through

3. Redis: data structures and their usage

4. Cache eviction strategies

Database

1. ACID properties

2. Transactions

3. Query Optimizations

4. ORMs

Real-time data

1. Server-Sent Events

2. Websockets

3. Polling

4. Webhooks

Monitoring & Logging

1. APM: Overview

2. Monitoring & SLAs: What are 999999s, etc?

3. Explore Sentry and other open-source tools such as Grafana and Prometheus.

Cloud & Networking

1. IP Addressing & Subnetting (IPv4, IPv6)

2. DNS Basics (How domain names resolve)

3. Sockets & Ports (How services communicate)

4. Firewalls & NAT (Basic security and network translation)

5. Network Performance Optimization (Keep-Alive, Pipelining, QUIC)

Deploying the App

1. Overview of CI/CD process

2. Basics of docker

   1. Image creation

   2. Running docker container

3. Deploying on

Hopefully, you have understood these concepts by now and have practiced a little bit. But now, you will build some projects to implement the concepts.

By this time, you can add Express/Nest to your project as the Node.js framework.

e-commerce store

1. Storefront

   1. implement pagination and filtering.

   2. introduce OAuth using Google or Facebook Sign-in

   3. Add cart and checkout functionality with database transactions and ACID properties.

   4. Optimize the listing and get single product API queries.

   5. Write a rate-limiting middleware in your app to restrict API usage.

2. Store Management

   1. CRUDs for store owners to add products

   2. Implement RBAC for different roles, such as admin, read-only, etc.

   3. Save randomly fetched data in Redis and with caching strategies as per the use case.

   4. Provide support for a merchant to fetch or upload details in CSV files and implement a child thread in Node.js to perform some operations on the files.

3. Any e-commerce application use case you can think of.

4. Containerize your app and deploy on Render/Heroku.

Realtime Chat Application

1. Implement websockets for messaging

2. Add JWT or OAuth 2.0 for AuthN/AuthZ.

3. Save messages in Redis.

4. Use Redis for leaderboard analytics for any use case, such as someone who gives instant replies.

5. Containerize your app and deploy on Render/Heroku.

For monitoring and logging, I will suggest sticking with Sentry, as it’s a managed service with a free trial available.

Congratulations on reaching this point! You have learned and implemented essential concepts of backend development, from security to database to deployment.

Before moving ahead, I will suggest building the projects and APIs using the tech we have just discussed.

It’s time to introduce some advanced concepts and patterns.

Event-driven Approach

1. Overview of event-driven approach

2. Understanding of producers and consumers

3. Event Brokers and Queues

4. Architectural approaches

   1. Pub/Sub Model

   2. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation)

I suppose that you have been using a service-based approach while calling different sub-services.

Now, we will replace the synchronous approach with an event-based approach and make these modifications to your project.

Replace synchronous flows with an event-based approach in the projects

1. e-commerce

There are multiple services in your e-commerce project, such as:

1. cart

2. products

3. checkout

4. customers

to name a few.

Here, we will implement a basic consumer/producer pattern.

When a customer checks out, the events should be pushed to product and customer service to update the inventory and customer purchase history.

You can implement other use cases, such as payment notifications, abandoned carts, etc.

2. URL Shortener

You can implement analytics using the event-driven approach that whenever a URL is opened, the user performs some action or closes, you can trigger a notification and show it in analytics.

By this time, you have got your hands dirty on the surface of most of the things.

Now, before moving any further, you need to build some more projects around it and implement all that you have learned so far.

Let’s move to some advanced concepts. I am pretty sure you will be getting these used in actual jobs and production environments with real users.

Architectural Styles

1. Monolith

2. Modular Monolith

3. Microservices and its patterns

4. Serverless Architectures

Scalability

1. Horizontal vs vertical scaling

2. Loadbalancing: concept, algorithms and tools

3. Database

   1. Sharding

   2. Partitioning

   3. Replication and related use cases

4. CAP Theorem

Fault Tolerance and High Availability

1. Circuit Breaker Patterns

2. Choas Engineering

3. Auto-scaling principles

Misc.

1. gRPC, protobuf

2. Intrusion Detection & Prevention system with SEIM

3. Service Mesh

4. DDoS Mitigation Techniques

You can build the following projects to implement your learning.

1. Notification systems like Instagram and LinkedIn.

2. Real-time trading systems

3. Personalization/Recommendation Engines

4. AI-based chatbots with LLM

Once you have built these projects, you have learned enough of the backend concepts to think and build something on your own.

Although these will be some basic projects, they will help you to transition to backend projects easily.

When should I learn a new language?

Once you have mastered these concepts using Node.js and built projects, then you can transition to Python or preferably Golang.

Courses and tutorials I recommend:

1. NodeJS - The Complete Guide (MVC, REST APIs, GraphQL, Deno)

2. Understanding Node.js: Core Concepts

3. Fundamentals of Backend Engineering

4. Node.js Design Patterns

Cheers!