source: content/en/posts/web-stacks.org@ cdbce2b

#+TITLE: Technologies of web development
#+DATE: <2022-10-11 Tue>
#+LANGUAGE: en

* Technologies of web development
#+BEGIN_abstract
In this article I'm going to categorize languages, frameworks, libraries
and software by a criteria of usage such technologies at hired work. It
might be biased and irrational, be aware.
#+END_abstract

I work in the IT field as a web developer for many years, but cannot
proudly claim myself as a professional. I don't know many things, I
don't like to work in general, I don't like corporate IT culture and I
don't like web development in particular, but I have an experience in
that field, and it is much easier to dive into it to earn money
for a living than other IT fields or other professions at my location. I
hope this text will be useful for someone who is outside of the field of
web development to get a grasp of technologies to learn.

* What is tech stack
#+BEGIN_abstract
The tech stack is the mix of technologies (software, frameworks, libraries)
that the project uses to implement a planned set of features.
#+END_abstract

Knowing everything from your tech stack is not the only key to
success. It can sound obvious, but social skills can play a more
important role than your programming skills. Programming is a very
social activity, everything you are going to use is built by other
people, sometimes something breaks and you need to contact people that
provide you the software you use, it is also important to communicate
with your company's team and not bring yourself into conflicts. And
don't be that guy (or me), who hates something technical so much, that
people get annoyed by you, it won't help you in any way. It can be seen
as a suppression of your ego, but the truth is that hired work is more
about collectivism than individualism.

Next, I present the list of technologies you should know to work as a
web developer. The list is not mandatary and you are not required to
learn it on an expert level to get your job offer.

* Technologies to learn
Some things you will use in most of your projects, so you are better to
familiarize yourself with them anyway. What I've discovered, is that
most knowledge of some tech is transferable to other techs.
** Text Editor
Not sure if I need to write it, but you need a development environment
where you will write code, run tests and compile your project.

*Most popular choices*
- [[https://gnu.org/software/emacs/][Emacs]] / [[https://www.vim.org/][Vim]] (I recommend them for a long run)
- Jetbrains IDE (proprietary)
- VSCode (proprietary)  

*Less popular*  
- Sublime (proprietary)
- [[https://www.eclipse.org/][Eclipse]] / [[https://netbeans.apache.org/][Netbeans]] / [[https://www.kdevelop.org/][Kdevelop]]
- other editors and IDEs

Proprietary means that source code is not available and probably it
costs money to use and you as a user don't have control over it. You can
learn more why it is important on the [[https://gnu.org/philosophy/][GNU website]]. Such an important
tool as a text editor should be free for everyone.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor][Wikipedia: Text editor]]] |
[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment][Wikipedia: Integrated development environment]]]

** SQL
Or it should be called persistence, but mostly you will use something
like [[https://www.postgresql.org/][Postgres]] or [[https://mariadb.com/kb/en/][MariaDB]]/[[https://mysql.com/][MySQL]]. Rarely it can be NoSQL like MongoDB.

The database is the main thing around which you will develop your
application. I would say that the code is secondary compared to the data
you store and get from the database, so it is an extremely good idea to
learn SQL well, especially in the long run. For the start, it is okay to
know a little and get going along the way because you will probably work
with SQL through ORM.

I recommend using [[https://dbeaver.io/][Dbeaver]] as IDE for running SQL-related code. It eases
the complexity of writing and running SQL.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL][Wikipedia: SQL]]] |
[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database][Wikipedia: Reletational Database]]]

*** ORM
Each tech stack provides ORM. ORM allows you to operate your database
"objects" as your programming language code without writing or
minimazing writing raw SQL. It is quite rare, when you need to work with
pure SQL or the project doesn't use ORM at all. ORMs might be something
from the list:
- [[https://hibernate.org/][Hibernate]]
- [[https://docs.djangoproject.com/][Django ORM]]
- [[https://www.doctrine-project.org/][Doctrine]]
- [[https://sqlalchemy.org/][SQLAlchemy]]
- [[https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_basics.html][Rails Active Record]]
- and many others

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL][Wikipedia: SQL]]] | [[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object%E2%80%93relational_mapping][Wikipedia: ORM]]]

** In-memory database
Some data needs to be stored in RAM for better performance. For that
cases you need to learn about Redis or similar technology. Such databases are:
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis][Redis]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached][Memcached]]

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-memory_database][Wikipedia: In-memory database]]]

** HTTP Server and HTTP protocol
You don't need to know everything from the start, but since you are
going to work as a web dev you need to know what you are using. It is
essential if you do backend APIs.

The HTTP server is usually [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx][Nginx]] or [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server][Apache]] (it is used rarely now). If you
work with Java, HTTP servers can be written in Java such as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetty_(web_server)][Jetty]] and
others.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server][Wikipedia: Web server]]] |
[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol][Wikipedia: Hypertext Transfer Protocol]]]

** Fulltext search
You might need searching functionality. It is okay to include google
search in basic cases, but it is not an acceptable choice in many
cases. To search like google does you will need full-text search
engines. You can use your database for that or specific solutions like
ElasticSearch for such purposes.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_search][Wikipedia: Full-text search]]] |
[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch][Wikipedia: Elasticsearch]]] (proprietary)

** Message broker
RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, Kafka and others. You need those to create queues and
other stuff that needs to be delayed. It is used because some languages
have limitation to implement such functionality, for example PHP.

[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_broker][Wikipedia: Message Broker]]

** Unix-like OS
You will probably work on Linux, variants of BSD systems, or macs. You
need to familiarize with the system you use, different tasks require
different degree of that skill, but knowledge of what you are using
every day will be handy.

There are many ways to learn it, but I recommend trying to install it on
your machine and learning it along the way. I recommend to starting with
[[https://debian.org/][Debian GNU/Linux distribution]]. You can read [[https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/][FAQs]], manuals about
[[https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/index.en.html][installation]] and [[https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/][how to use the system]]. Docs are very useful, they are
will be present in your filesystem you can read them by jumping into
/usr/share/docs folder or running ~info~ and ~man~ commands. I recommend
reading it and exploring the Debian website. Also for learning Linux
Arch Linux wiki is a good source of knowledge (Slackware and Gentoo
wikis are good as well).

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix][Wikipedia: Unix]]] |
[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux][Wikipedia: Linux]]] |
[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution][Wikipedia: Linux distribution]]]

** OOP
You will be probably forced to use OOP techniques in corporate IT
culture. It is not something that improves development that much, but it
is a very common way to organize codebase and it is kind of great for
working with many people. If you ask me, I would say that [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)][Closures]] and
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_programming][Modules]] are much more game-changing tech improvements that happened in
computer science than OOP.

Not everyone will degree with my definition, but patterns are needed to
express by your programming language object system, which is impossible
to express otherwise, because of some language limitations. It is very
true for very static and not expressive languages like PHP or Java and
less true for more expressive languages like Lisp and Haskell.

Besides the basic principle of using OOP in your programming language of
choice, you are going to need patterns to learn. The benefits of them
are questionable, but it is not bad to know and they are being asked in
interviews often.

The best way to learn patterns is to use [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk][Smalltalk]] and read the book
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns]["Gang of Four"]]. [[https://martinfowler.com/][Martin Fowler]] is a great source of enterprise-level
patterns and notes about enterprise development in general. Also, there
is a very useful website about design patterns with examples in many
mainstream languages: https://refactoring.guru/

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming][Wikipedia: OOP]]] | [[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern][Wikipedia: Software design pattern]]]

** Debugger
You have a chance to work with others people's code, so you have a
chance to get confused by a lot of stuff going on. Also, it is possible
that you would make a mistake and will not understand what is going on,
or where is an error. In that case, you will need a debugger. The
debugger is usually can be part of your text editor environment and it
is usually included in your programming environment alongside your
interpreter / compiler. Some languages don't include a debugger, so you
need to download it separately.

The debugger allows you to step through your code and see the values of
stack and heap, basically you get access to everything evaluated by your
interpreter/compiler. It is very common practice to use such a thing
when errors happen and I think, that it is a great way to learn how your
language of choice works internally.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugger][Wikipedia: Debugger]]]

** Profiler
A profiler is similar to a debugger, but it helps you to detect which
part of your program is running slow, it also helps you detect memory
leaks. Sometimes you or others write functions and do everything as
intended, but it is running slow. To understand which part of your code
is a bottleneck you need to run it in a profiler. Then profiler will
show you a diagram with the execution time and memory consumption of
your functions, which is helpful even when everything works fine.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_(computer_programming)][Wikipedia: Profiler]]]

** Frontend
If you are not exclusively backend developer, you will probably need to
work with templates. Templates represent the outer view of your website,
which represents backend's inner workings. Frontend part can be done
using template engine or can be done as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application][Single Page Application]] with
lots of client-side javascript coe.

*** HTML
HTML is used for representing your website information to your users. It
contains only structural data and very basic formatting. If you see
something that looks like an old document, that is probably plain HTML
used.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_template_system][Wikipedia: Web Template System]]] |
[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application][Wikipedia: Single-page Application]]]

*** CSS
CSS is being used for creating styling for your HTML pages. The role of
CSS is to make your html layouts pretty, to make your buttons beautiful
and the grid is clear.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS][Wikipedia: CSS]]]

*** Javascript
Javascript is being used for creating interactivity with your HTML
pages. If you see a dropdown menu, carousel, or slider, there is
probably javascript involved. Javascript is a big and complex
programming language, so you as a web developer will be required to know
only a subset of it except if your main programming language is
Javascript.

If you work with SPA Application, you might be interested in learning:
- [[https://reactjs.org/][React]]
- [[https://vuejs.org/][Vue]]
- [[https://angularjs.org/][Angular]]
- [[https://emberjs.com/][Ember]]
- probably other technologies

Popular non-SPA library is [[https://jquery.com/][JQuery]] and plugins for it.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript][Wikipedia: Javascript]]]

*** Template engines
Template engines are needed to transfer your backend data to your
user. It provides a way to generate HTML with embedding variables and
different functions for the developer's ease. The template engine is
usually built-in in your framework of choice.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_processor][Wikipedia: Template Processor]]]

** Docker
Your team probably will use docker for deployment or development (or
both). You might want to get your project working in a container for
better accessibility by your team. The point of docker as a development
tool is to let your team quickly get the same environment as you. The
point of docker as a deployment tool is to deploy the same environment
that you developing in, it is important to have a reproducible
production environment because catching bugs in 3 different environments
(dev, staging, prod) suck a lot.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_(software)][Wikipedia: Docker]]]

** API
There are standard ways to build APIs. If you are going to focus on that
part of an application, only backend work, you should learn it.
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer][RestAPI]]
- [[https://jsonapi.org/][JSONAPI]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraphQL][GraphQL]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP][SOAP]]
- and others

The framework you use might provide a specific way for declaring APIs. For
example, Symfony has [[https://api-platform.com/][API Platform]] and Django has [[https://www.django-rest-framework.org/][Django REST Framework]].

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_API][Wikipedia: Web API]]]

** Type hierarchy and standard library
Every programming language has a standard library. The standard library
is a library that comes together with your language, so you don't need
to install any external dependencies to use it. Sometimes it is
implicit, so you don't need to import anything, sometimes it is
explicit, so you need to declare dependencies you use from the standard
library.

To learn more about your standard library, you should see your
programming language documentation.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_library][Wikipedia: Standard Library]]]

** Package Manager
It is hard to build something using only a standard library. Ideally you
should try to use the standard library as much as you can, but it is
very possible that the standard library will not include everything you
would ever need. In such cases, you would use external software to get
such software you can use package managers such as npm for nodejs, pip
for python, composer for php, maven for java and gem for ruby.

Such package manager can be installed together with your programming
language interpreter or can be installed externally. Check package
manager documentation about its installation.

It is important to know the basics of how they work in general. The
topic of dependency resolution is hard, but for end-users, it should be
quite easy to work.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager][Wikipedia: Package Manager]]]

** Version Manager
If you don't use docker all the way, sometimes you will need to change
your interpreter version depending on the project you use. To change
let's say nodejs 18 to nodejs 16, you will need something called version
manager, for that particular case you will need NVM (Node Version
Manager). Such version managers exist for many languages (RVM, Pyenv,
Jenv and so on).

** Version Control
You should always use version control system even if you work completely
alone. Version control allows you to work with other people and check
changes over your codebase over time. This is essential technology
to know for development these days, at least if we talk about hired work
as web developer.

Version Control Systems:
- Git
- Mercurial
- Darcs
- Bazaar
- Subversion  
- RCS
- CVS
- and others

Git is popular version control system and you probably will use it or
already using it.

To learn what is it all about you can watch [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92sycL8ij-U][a short series of videos
about git from computerphile]].

[[https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2][Book called "Pro Git"]] can help you to learn Git in more depth.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control][Wikipedia: Version Control]]]

** Framework or(and) set of libraries
Every job sticks to its own stack. Very often it sticks to one specific
web framework, that you are required to learn. It can be something like
Django, Symfony, Spring, Ruby on Rails, or others.

Frameworks are usually the biggest part of your codebase. The difference
between framework and library: Framework runs your code with your
classes, but libraries are being used by you explicitly and you execute
all the code from them. The concept of reverting control over the code
to your framework is called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_of_control][Inversion of Control]].

To learn your framework of choice you should read its documentation. If
documentation is bad then I would recommend not using it. Sometimes
framework developers sell additional courses or books on using their
product (IMO it's bad).

** Programming language
And the last but very important item on our list is the programming
language itself. You should know it, you should know it well. To
distinguish that item from the standard library I should point out that
programming language consists of its syntax, semantics and in general it
is every fundamental language block that is not described in that
language itself (an example is the standard library).

Mostly it is easy to understand your programming language since most of
 it is a standard library. Many fundamental concepts of programming
 languages come from programming in general. So you can read a book or
 learn different programming languages by documentation and there is a
 huge chance that concepts from them can be applied to many languages,
 not just one.

It is a good idea to learn programming, complexity with big O notation,
data structures, algorithms, compiler/interpreter construction and so
on. But it is not so required in actual day-to-day work, especially for
web development. You can argue about this, but I would say that this is
mostly true for many types of work since many libraries and SQL
databases manage complexity on their own, all you need to declare your
classes and don't make them leak memory that much.

[[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming][Wikipedia: Programming]]] | [[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language][Wikipedia: Programming language]]] | [[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science][Wikipedia: Computer Science]]]

* Most popular programming languages
Your choices are quite limited here. More jobs available, more chances
to get that job. there will be different results in different areas. I
think that in most areas you will have a choices between Java, Python
and maybe PHP or Ruby. If you want to end up insane, there is also
Javascript, but it is not that mature for backend as other technologies
(it is my biased opinion), so I will not include it (there is only "big"
framework called NestJS and demend of it is probably low).

** Java / C#
Probably the most popular programming languages out there especially
when it comes to working at companies. It is statically typed and quite
easy to learn languages. They are restricted to OOP moslty, so you
prorably will use oop design patterns here more than in other
programming language. Type system are not that advanced as in ML
dialects and actually it is unsound as in other mainstream languages,
but it provides some merits of safety compared to nonsafe C or weak
typed languages such PHP and Javascript.  

Frameworks:
- [[https://spring.io/projects/spring-framework][Spring]]
- [[https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/][.Net]]

ORM:
- [[https://hibernate.org/orm/][Hibernate]]

[[[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/][C# Documentation]]] | [[[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/][Java Documentation]]]

** Python
Second the most popular programming language. It differs from Java a
lot. It is dynamic typed, strongly type, more object oriented than Java
(everything is an object), but somehow manages to look like a procedural
code, it forces you to indent your code right.

Personally I like Python more than other mainstream languages, it does
many things right. I like that being fully object-oriented language it
doesn't drop to dogmatic believing in OOP patterns. It also has good
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93print_loop][REPL]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_programming][reflection]]/[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection][introspection]] abilities without writing much code
like in Java or PHP.

Frameworks:
- [[https://djangoproject.com/][Django]]
- [[https://palletsprojects.com/p/flask/][Flask]]
- [[https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/][FastAPI]]
- [[https://trypyramid.com/][Pyramid]]

ORM:
- Django ORM (Active Record)
- [[https://www.sqlalchemy.org/][SQLAlchemy]] (Data Mapper)

Learning resources:
- [[https://www.python.org/doc/][Python Documentation]]
- [[https://realpython.com/][Real Python]]
- [[https://www.fullstackpython.com/][Fullstack Python]]

** PHP
PHP might be unpopular in some areas, but it is quite popular in
Russia. It runs lots of small businesses and it is probably the easiest
tech stack to get a job (but not the easiest language to work with). The
language has lots of caveats such as weak typing, unorganized standard
library, less developed OOP and type checking, lots of procedural php
legacy, most functions of the language is defined in C. My personal
observation is that PHP has the worst error messages compared to other
high level languages.

Frameworks:
- [[https://symfony.com/][Symfony]]
- [[https://laravel.com/][Laravel]]

ORM:
- [[https://www.doctrine-project.org/][Doctrine]]

Learning resources:
- [[https://www.php.net/docs.php][PHP documentation]]
- [[https://symfonycasts.com/][Symfonycast (paid)]]
  
* Less popular programming language
** Go
Is compiled statically typed procedural language made by creators of
C. It has garbage collection as interpreted languages. It has rich
standard library and as I understand used mostly for devops or
microservices and less used for building monolithic application as in
other programming languages. It also has strong abilities to do parallel
computations. Language doesn't have REPL and strong
reflection/introspection abilities.

Learning resources:
- [[https://go.dev/][GO documentation]]

** Ruby
Ruby is mostly used for web development, because of popularity of Ruby
on Rails framework. The demand of it might be low in some areas, so
investigate your market yourself before learning it. Ruby is strongly
type object-oriented in smalltalk sense language. It has mixed lisp,
perl and smalltalk roots. It has very powerful REPL,
reflection/introspection abilities, probably the best after LISPs and
Smalltalk. The biggest downside of the language is lack of good
documentation on ruby website.

Frameworks:
- [[https://rubyonrails.org/][Ruby on Rails]]
- [[https://sinatrarb.com/][Sinatra]]

ORM:
- [[https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_basics.html][Active Record]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataMapper][DataMapper]]

Learning resources:
- [[https://poignant.guide/][why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby]]
- [[https://ruby-doc.org/docs/ruby-doc-bundle/ProgrammingRuby/book/language.html][Programming Ruby Book]]
- [[https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/][Ruby Website]]
  
* Harder to find a work languages
- Scala
- Haskell
- Erlang
- Clojure
- Rust

- (C/C++) since they are not suitable for web development

* Almost impossible to find a work languages
- Any LISP
- SML
- Other powerful functional programming languages such as Agda, COQ and
  so on
  
* How to get good
First of all don't buy any paid course or workshops, most information
are available for free for everyone. Just read wikipedia links I
provided in artible and follow links there to official documentation of
the thing you want to learn.

When it comes to programming in general I recommend learning it doing
test projects or just playing with the code. For practice you can also
use services like Exercism or Codewars to practice pure programming
solving problems. Also there is great web resource for complete
beginners called [[https://freecodecamp.org/][FreeCodeCamp]], it covers basics of web development and
javascript programming.

Also I recommend reading old academic books on programming, because many
concepts are the same in many programming languages, what you need is
the ability think abstractly using data structures and algorithms. I
recommend anyone who wants to really grock programming to read:
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs][SICP]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs][HTDP]]
- [[https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/][TAPL]]
- [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentials_of_Programming_Languages][Essentials Of Programming Languages]]
- [[https://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/ProgrammingGroundUp-1-0-booksize.pdf][Programming from the ground up]]
- Also see [[https://www.gnu.org/doc/other-free-books.html][free books from GNU website]]

/Basically the rule of thumb is that if the book has wikipedia article,
it is probably a good book and you should read it/.
      
There are many free sources to learn you just need to invest your time
into it. The downside of learning LISP is that mainstream programming on
your job can feel very restrictive and less expressive. Also you will
probably learn, that many mainstream languages have lots of quircks or
plainly bad design decisions.

* Conclusion
It is also possible to get a job with less popular stack, but if you are
just starting it might be reasonable to focus on popular one first. The
list of technologies is quite big, so newbies can be lost in new
information. Be patient and learn one thing at the time. I would
recommend starting with programming language documentation, then SQL and
then going to docs of your web-framework / library.

Demand for web developers is huge and in my opinion it is the easiest
way to get a job. The web development sucks in general (at least for
me), but that topic will be hold for another article.