On his Medium.com site, Adnan Ahmed has shared some of his thoughts about being a modern backend developer in 2018. In it he talks about the current state of backend development and makes some recommendations for those wanting to get started.

Web development today is completely different from what it was a few years ago; there are lots of different things that can easily baffle anyone entering into the web development. It was one of the reasons that we decided to make these step by step visual guides demonstrating the bigger picture and to give anyone a clear idea about what they have to follow to be in certain roles in web development.

The post starts with a large infographic showing the basic steps and some of the related technologies and concepts to go with them. Following this they break it down into more detail in a text form with summaries attached for each. There are a lot of topics in the list (24 of them) but here's some of the highlights:

• Learn a Language
• Learn a Package Manager
• Standards and Best Practices
• Security
• ?Learn about the Relational [and NoSQL] Databases
• Learning a Framework
• Caching
• RESTful APIs
• Different Auth Methods
• GraphQL [and Graph Databases]

His final recommendation is one that's good for beginners and veterans in the software development world alike: "keep exploring". If you stop learning and stop trying new things you'll stagnate in your own work and career. Challenge yourself to learn something new - a new language, tool or technique - as often as possible and apply it to your work.