A good back-end developer could just be the difference between a home that can withstand a hurricane and one that collapses in a high wind season.
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Additionally, they need to work under pressure to meet deadlines and refactor, debug, or scale quickly. There's a lot to deal with, and some of the most common sins committed by backend developers can have lasting consequences. Let's review the 6 most important ones.
#1 You shouldn’t accumulate too much technical debt
The first sin is common to both back-end and front-end developers: having a significant pile of technical debt. Agile teams do, in fact, rely on technical debt to provide faster solutions and deliver better products, but odds are that the more you accumulate, the greater the chance that it will be more difficult to implement new solutions or scale the project later.
The maxim here is, don't build code on top of bad code , because as soon as you refactor the new code will probably break. Spaghetti code, long functions/methods, lots of indentation, excessive if/else statements, and poor variable naming practices may seem like small details with insignificant consequences, but they can lead to a lot of problems.
With good coding practices and good planning, technical debt can be avoided, and in cases where it is necessary, a good protocol to go along with it will go a long way in preventing the team from building a mountain on top of a house of cards.
#2 You should not write poor quality documentation
Good documentation is like a well-drawn map or a good recipe: it leaves nothing to the imagination. To take a page from Python's zen, explicit is better than implicit . In this sense, one of the biggest sins of back-end developers is thinking of documentation as an afterthought.
Poor or missing documentation will cause confusion at best or completely stop a project as developers will have to manually review the code line by line to figure out what is going on.
With good documentation practices, front-end developers will have an easier time understanding how their side of the project will communicate with the back-end, and those who come after will have a reliable source of information to turn to when looking for bugs or during restructuring.
As a bonus, we can add another commandment: you must comment your code . Just like clean documentation, commented code will help code reviewers and other developers understand the underlying logic. These comments can even help developers themselves when they come back to review code they haven't touched in a while.
#3 You should not miss exams
Testing is an integral part of any development cycle. Writing tests and looking for edge cases helps backend developers detect bugs and explore scenarios that might otherwise go unnoticed until it's too late. Still, some developers choose to skip some tests, perhaps because they want to meet a tight deadline or because they are overconfident.
So this sin usually happens when developers run out of time or when they trust their own judgment/code reviews too much. No pair of eyes has enough experience to predict the behavior of a code in all possible situations.
A simple way to avoid this problem is to write the tests alongside the code or share the pseudocode with another developer and have them write a suite of tests. In fact, some teams go so far as to first create the most extreme tests possible and then write the code. This way, they are effectively developing to solve edge cases.
Tests are a reliable way to ensure that code is working as expected and that the logic behind it is flexible enough to adapt and scale as required by the project.
#4 You should not use too many technologies for the same solution
One of the biggest advantages of working with popular programming languages like Python or node.js is the amount of resources available. So why write something from scratch when you can simply import it?
But that opens the door to its own set of problems. Relying too much on external software and libraries means, first and foremost, that you are dealing with multiple APIs at the same time, and that in itself is a challenge.
But other than that, technologies are constantly updated, which can bring unwanted changes or bugs that can break your own project. Plus, projects become obsolete and that awesome library you found can suddenly disappear in the blink of an eye.
This does not mean that you should limit yourself to one solution, but rather a word of caution: introducing new technologies into a project should always be a well thought out decision and that sometimes walking the extra mile to do it yourself will avoid headaches in the future. line.
#5 You must not forget a backup protocol
Almost every backend developer has to deal with databases in their career, and as we all know, if an application is a body, then data is the lifeblood of it. Good back-end developers keep extensive backups of their data, in the cloud, on physical media, on remote servers, just about anywhere. Without them, engineers risk losing all of their work due to a hardware or software crash.
That's why backups must be frequent and reliable. If your data is updated minute by minute, missing a few days can be catastrophic for a project. It's better to invest in a storage solution than lose everything with one mistake.
#6 You must not have bad planning before building the data model
Rebuilding a model from scratch can be a nightmare, so getting it right the first time will save time and investment in the project. Sometimes the restructuring of data models is inevitable, but let these moments be the product of external influences and not a lack of foresight.
Good backend developers get a very clear picture of what the project is supposed to do and will design a model that fits the project with scalability in mind, even if the project doesn't involve scaling anytime soon.
Designing a good data model is an excellent example of long-term planning and will avoid the problems that arise with databases that exceed their capabilities.
A good backend developer is a strategist and a team player
Technical skill is not the only thing a back-end developer needs to be good. What really makes a specialist shine is that they understand the role they play in the development team and how much the project depends on their work. Hiring a good back-end developer could just be the difference between a home that can withstand a hurricane and one that collapses in a high wind season.
