Regardless of how beautiful and well designed a house is, if the foundations are weak it’s just a matter of time before you start seeing cracks and leaks all over the place. And if you ever want to remodel or expand it, you might end up spending time and resources fixing the foundations before any work can be done.
An astute reader will have already figured c level contact list out that I’m not really talking about real estate development but rather about the similarities between house construction and app development. While users get to interact with the frontend of an application, it’s actually the backend that’s doing the heavy lifting. That’s why collaborating with the best backend engineers possible is essential.
Of course, a lot goes into being a good backend developer. It’s not enough to have a good handling of a framework, to meet the demands of modern markets a backend aspirant should have at least a good handling of:
- Data structures and algorithms
- Databases and data models
- Several frameworks (and the respective programming languages they are based on)
- Cloud hosting (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure)
- Server architecture
- Dockers
On top of that, they have to work under pressure to meet deadlines and to refactor, debug or rescale on the fly. There is a lot to handle, and some of the most common sins backend developers make can have long-lasting consequences. Let’s review the 6 most important ones.
#1 You shall not accumulate too much technical debt
The first sin is common to both backend digital marketing agency as a partner in online growth and frontend developers: having a significant technical debt stack. Agile teams indeed rely on technical debt to provide faster solutions and to deliver better products, but odds are that the more you accumulate, the higher the chance that it will be harder to implement new solutions or scale the project later on.
The maxim here is, don’t build code on top of bad code, as once you get to refactoring the new code will probably break. Spaghetti code, long functions/methods, too many indentations, excessive if/else statements, and bad variable naming practices may seem like small details with insignificant consequences, but they can build up to heaps of trouble.
#2 You shall not write poor documentation
Good documentation is like a well-drawn map or a good recipe: it leaves nothing to the imagination. To take a page from the zen of Python, explicit is better than implicit. In that sense, one of the greatest sins for backend developers is to think of documentation as an afterthought.
Poor or missing documentation will lead to confusion in the best of cases or will outright stop a project in its tracks as developers will have to manually review the code line by line to figure out what’s going on.
With good documentation practices, frontend search engine optimization mails developers will have an easier time grasping how their side of the project will communicate with the backend and those that come after will have a reliable source of information to fall back on when hunting for bugs or when restructuring.
As a bonus, we can add another commandment: you shall comment your code. Much like clean documentations, commented code will help code reviewers and other developers understand the underlying logic. These comments can even help the developers themselves when they go back to review a code they haven’t touched in a while.