Aurora GraphQL

Software used to power openusercss.org

This list is inspired by the Kamran Ahmed's "2019 Developer Roadmap." https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap Without further ado, my take on the most important technologies to learn for back-end web development in 2019!

JAM (Javascript API Markup) stack sites are the new black in the web-development world, so if you are looking to try your hand at the latest trend, take a look at the best tools of the trade, right here in this list. If you are confused about the value that can come from a JAMStack site, that is because JAMStack is one of the most poorly explained concepts on the web, specifically describing what problem it solves and what solutions it replaces. The purpose of JAMstack is essentially to create the same sort of website Drupal or Wordpress would build for you, but outsource the back-end functionality as much as possible, especially for static-sites, so that developers are focused on front end. This is done by using Javascript to define the front end behaviour, APIs to provide functionality to back-end hosted services, and Markup, which defines formatting. The rest of the stack can be outsourced to external infrastructure, whether it is CDNs for content delivery, back-end-as-service support like Firebase, and CMS used to define content like Contentful. Essentially, all you are left with is text files in a static respository like Github Pages, which is the basis for the site. No webserver is even required because the CDN serves the pages based on what is built from the Github Pages. This results in a significantly reduced attack surface and a super fast website loading time that doesn't rely on a central server for uptime.