The Goal

The primary goal for Backend4Dummies is to be a public notebook for learning Backend Software Development.

It's been my experience that the first step to learning is intuition. As such, my focus is on writing short descriptions of very complex concepts to get the gist.

Further, I'd like to suggest that we can think of all “educational media” in three different ways. The first are intuition builders. The second are highly detailed summaries, and the third are quick cheat sheets. Currently Backend4Dummies is primarily geared toward intuition builders and cheat sheets.

The first reason for this pedagogical approach is practical. In order to write a detailed explanation of a given subject, I have to be an expert. It would require an inordinate amount of intellectual hubris to even attempt this feat. However, it would be pretty cool.

The second reason for this strategy lies in part of the reason I fell in love with programming. To build something substantial (presumably why one would read something like this), there's no need to know everything! Abstraction lets us work with software without understanding every detail inside it. Open-source, well-trusted, and extensive libraries allow us to use tools made by other people without building everything from scratch.

In a lot of ways, the elaborate word form before is completely relevant to the central point. Put simply, the concept of abstraction (applied in a general context) requires trust in others. It's epistemic humility to understand that you cannot comprehend every part of a system, and to think otherwise is quite absurd.

In more ways than one, building software is a communal project. It's the compilation of developers sitting in rooms across the globe, pushing code to make the internet work. It's a historical archive, relaying the needs and understandings of the world.