Backend engineering

We can’t talk about backend development before 2000’s when internet became a common households thing. Back in 2000’s java and c++ were all the hype. PHP was released and was just starting to gain some traction. Some of today’s relics of the past like adobe’s coldfusion were also the thing to look out for. Python was used, but more as a hobbyist-s thing than a professional language. Ruby existed, but Ruby on Rails wasn’t out there until it’s first release in 2004. Golang wasn’t released until the 2009. Rust had it’s first release a year latter. Things weren’t as stable and secure as they are today. In those days servers were often misconfigured, vulnerabilities were lurking everywhere. But somehow as a humanity we’ve managed to overcome all that and get to more and more stable technology. With tech moving so fast we think that in 10-20 years from now we will look back and wonder… god how did we do it all with that lousy technology?

However, back to us. We are backend developers.

Even though we’re not a a big fan of presentation layer, we’ll use it. Our personal preferences lies in well defined api’s and interfaces. For interaction we prefer the console. We understand it and we have mastered it’s power.

Linux is our go to operating system. Open source is our bread and butter. We have many trades, and use many languages. Configuring servers and networks, using databases to store sensitive data, using various models to tie the data together, doing various queues, doing processing pipelines, working with algorithms, working with various data structures. Those are all our daily things. We’ve got a thing for big data as well as huge processing power. We’re aware that a simple misconfiguration or non-performant code can bring the whole system down. So we take our job quite seriously.

We simply believe, these days, the most powerful things happen inside machines, and are invisible to client. They are on the backend.

Did you know

• cURL was first released in 1996. It was originally named httpget and then became urlget before adopting the current name of cURL

About Illustration

For our hero we’ve decided for high tech monkey as that they simply look cool and advanced. Everybody simply loves them. When working with code we often feel as if we’re monkeys. However once we solve that algorithm, once we complete that feature, squash that bug, deliver that project, it’s simply the best feeling in the world.

We’ve went with dark red colors and tried to make them look a bit dark and twisted. We think they illustrate the way backend developers feel while coding. To us, the feeling is similar to taming a powerful machine built beast. Since most of us are dark and gloomy, we wanted our technologically superior monkey to give out the same vibe.

In the end we went with simple text, just saying backend and showing a checkbox in matching colors. It doesn’t have to mean you know backend, it can mean you aspire to learn it.