The Ship It Podcast

Episode 1: What it means to be a backend developer.

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In our first episode, host Brandon Aaskov (Principal Software Developer, Rocket Insights) and Matt Merrill (Principal Software Developer, Rocket Insights) pontificate on what it means to be a backend developer in 2019.  We delve into what "Full Stack" means, why you need to wait to scale, and a lot about interviewing!  


Topics (including links to picks from the end):

  • 0:00 - Intros
  • 1:30  - What's the line between a front end and backend dev?  Bootstrapping applications is important.  Getting things going from scratch.
    • Image talked about at 4:30
  • 5:45 -  Where backend dev blurs into devops.
  • 6:30 -  Hiring: Unicorns are hard to hire.  What questions to ask on a backend interview.
  • 10:15 - Walking into an existing backend codebase is hard
  • 11:45 - Level of developer experience
  • 12:30 - Ruby on Rails and choices already being made for you
  • 15:00 - The demise of the backend developer? (Firebase/Backend As A Service, headless CMS's and DevOps)
  • 20:00 - Start a backend cheaply and scale when you know more
  • 22:30 - The art of a good API
  • 25:00 - Back to backend interviews
  • 26:30 - Soft skills are important
  • 27:30 - Information hoarding and simplification of a backend
  • 28:45 - We're horrible at math
  • 29:15 - Picks:
    • Code Sandbox - https://codesandbox.io/
  • RunJS - https://runjs.dev/
    • The Unix Philosophy writeup - https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/ch01s06.html
    ...more
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