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Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

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Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#31

Post by jgwil2 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #28
tifadg1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds very niche from an employability PoV.

You are by all means welcome to remain ignorant of how computers and frameworks and libraries all work, incapable of tracking down and fixing bugs in your application stack that affect you. Build a career filling in the boilerplate that Spring or Rails or whatever generates, and when the system doesn't perform as you expected it to, throw up your hands and say "I don't know what it's doing," and end the matter there.…

Well, one doesn't have time to learn everything, so it's entirely reasonable to do a cost-benefit analysis (in terms of employability or personal interest) before investing.

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#32

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

sidlls wrote: post #27
tifadg1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds very niche from an employability PoV.

These skills have helped me at every single job I've had, including my current one, where I've employed the skill a couple of times to discover bugs or unintended side-effects in third-party library code. For context I've worked in the industry for about 15 years now, in roles ranging from low-level programming on real-time systems to (currently) high level machine learning work. It might be niche, but it can also be…

Totally agree with this. I have never written C or C++ in a professional manner but just knowing how to debug and compile it has proved to be an invaluable skill. Lots of software ecosystems often have some underlying C/C++ code that they are calling out to and being able to dive into that when there is an issue is an incredible skill to have.

Make, Ninja etc. are fairly straightforward compared to something like Gradle and just knowing my way around that and Clang/GnuCC has gotten me a lot farther in my career.

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#33

Post by Diggsey »

IME, it's the following considerations that make back-end development hard:

- Fault tolerance. - Backwards (or forwards) compatibility. - Scalability. - Testability. - Everything around state (backup/restore, migration strategies, data integrity, etc.)

Most other things are a one-time cost. These things are an ongoing burden to consider, but if you forget to consider them it can be devastating.

Also remember: any time you give a (internal or external) customer programmatic access to something, that is an API, and APIs have huge costs to maintain. That includes when you dump your database into "data lake" for internal reporting...

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#34

Post by davidkell »

Zealotux wrote: post #29

I'm currently learning back-end coming from a front-end career, and I started reading "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann, seems to be a must-have for anyone who wants to get serious in this field.

+1 For this recommendation, an exceptional book. In particular chapters 2-3 demystify how databases work, and provides an intuition on when to use different kinds of databases and query languages without the typical hype (spoiler alert - use an RDBMS!)

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#35

Post by tekstar »

tifadg1 wrote: post #18
tekstar wrote: post #11

C and how to debug it. If you understand the system a layer of abstraction or two below the layer you work in, you will be able to debug deeper. Learn system calls, Various ways how to examine processes. I learnt a lot of this back in the day by completing war games on a site called digital evolution (dievo). Those are antiquated now but still a really fun way to learn it.

sounds very niche from an employability PoV.

Yeah it's the complete opposite of niche. It's the fundamental understanding of processes, signals, syscalls, memory that every modern computing system is based upon.

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#36

Post by pdpi »

tifadg1 wrote: post #18
tekstar wrote: post #11

C and how to debug it. If you understand the system a layer of abstraction or two below the layer you work in, you will be able to debug deeper. Learn system calls, Various ways how to examine processes. I learnt a lot of this back in the day by completing war games on a site called digital evolution (dievo). Those are antiquated now but still a really fun way to learn it.

sounds very niche from an employability PoV.

It doesn't make you "employable". It does make you incredibly valuable once you're inside. Being able to debug systems and being able to talk to other teams working on different levels of abstraction are both incredibly important skills.

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#38

Post by konart »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #28
tifadg1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds very niche from an employability PoV.

You are by all means welcome to remain ignorant of how computers and frameworks and libraries all work, incapable of tracking down and fixing bugs in your application stack that affect you. Build a career filling in the boilerplate that Spring or Rails or whatever generates, and when the system doesn't perform as you expected it to, throw up your hands and say "I don't know what it's doing," and end the matter there.…

>>frameworks and libraries all work, incapable of tracking down and fixing bugs in your application stack...

What does any of this has to do with C?

>What can you possibly get out of it?

I hope you realise that many of commenters here are not even software engineers. HN covers more topics than just 'another arrogant software dev lectures someone on topic X'

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#39

Post by throwaway81523 »

comprev wrote: post #16
throwaway81523 wrote: post #13

Security mindset: read the book Security Engineering (it is online), less for specific technical info than for the many war stories etc. which will help you guard against vulnerabilities and unforeseen consequences. Basics of cryptography: there are many dumb errors to avoid. Antirez's general advice about "10x programmers" is good: http://antirez.com/news/112 Thorough (not just basic) knowledge of SQL, if you don't…

This book? https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

Yes. It is a little bit old by now, but it is a great book.

Re: Ask HN: Language-agnostic concepts a Backend Engineer should know?

#40

Post by pdpi »

jgwil2 wrote: post #31
fennecfoxen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are by all means welcome to remain ignorant of how computers and frameworks and libraries all work, incapable of tracking down and fixing bugs in your application stack that affect you. Build a career filling in the boilerplate that Spring or Rails or whatever generates, and when the system doesn't perform as you expected it to, throw up your hands and say "I don't know what it's doing," and end the matter there.…

Well, one doesn't have time to learn everything, so it's entirely reasonable to do a cost-benefit analysis (in terms of employability or personal interest) before investing.

The OP's statement makes the context clear though: It's not about knowing everything. It's about knowing a couple of abstraction layers under you (and, as I argued elsewhere, above you too).

It's useful to understand a few classic networking problems that a backend engineer might face — e.g. weird latency issues caused by Nagle's algorithm, or TCP CLOSE_WAIT leading to ephemeral port exhaustion between a proxy and an application node. It's useful to understand why we mostly moved to event loop-based servers instead of thread-per-connection servers as a way to handle c10k.

A backend engineer doesn't necessarily have to be an expert on any of these things, but they should be able to follow along if an expert explains that sort of problem.

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