A year ago I started my journey in the web-development world. Like a lot of self-taught developers I took some courses on front-end development and started with some simple projects.
In these projects making API calls was an important part of the application. Whether it was with Axios or fetch. There were a set of rules I had to follow. When making a API call you had to make sure to include the following (some optional):
- URL
- Method
- Body
- Header
And I am probably forgetting a few more..
This didn’t really make sense for me at the time. I knew I had to include them when making a GET or POST request. I promised myself to maybe someday check it out.
A lot of bugs, red screens and liters of coffee later, we fast forward to 2020. The world is in the midst of a pandemic. Covid-19 is taking the world by storm and this meant for a lot of people working from home and a lot of extra time. Including me. This was the perfect time for me to deep dive into the world of back-end. Fortunately for me as a Javascript developer I was able to do this with Node.js and Express.js.
I took a comprehensive course on the topics by Maximilian Schwarzmüller. I This cleared up so much about the questions I had when working with fetch or Axios.
Why is Content-Type sometimes application/json and other times a multipart/form-data?
This depends on the size and data type you post.
Why do we send params in a url?
This is used in the back-end to retrieve the right data from the database.
What is the reason we have to send bearer tokens with certain API calls?
This is for security reasons, it allows us to get, post or update data only when we are authorized.
And a lot more questions got answered!
This took a few weeks to complete but gave me a good understanding of the different parts of back-end development and a general basis of how it works. I believe this has changed me as a developer and really affected the way I work on the front-end side of my applications.
Not only because I now better understand how the data handling process in applications takes place, but now I also have a better grasp of what back-end developers go through and why they do the things they do. I am able to better assess whether certain issues should be handled on the front-end side of the application or the back-end side.
This is why I can really recommend other developers to take some time to learn the other side of the development spectrum you are working in. You are better able to have some empathy for the people you work with on different parts of an application, site or game. Do you have some free time? A game developer? Try making some 3d assets. Web developer? Make a simple back-end. Hotel? Trivago (Just kidding).
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