A new world with Express.js
After learning lots about the frontend world I finally arrived to the land I hoped to see for long, it was called backend and I was ready for it. Fortunately, stepping into it didn't represent big changes as I feared it would. On the contrary, I could keep coding with Javascript for longer while being introduced to its main backend framework called Express.js.
The beginning of this new step in my dev journey began with the MDN Express tutorial. I know, I said that I was not going to follow tutorials through my learning path but what I actually meant was that I wanted to avoid tutorials for making my portfolio. Not doing tutorials at all is bad advice specially when you are new to a topic or technology because there's no way to go anywhere without a starting point.
Back to my story, the MDN Express tutorial was easy to follow and I wanted to see how far I could go with it on my first backend project. The main idea was to code a timetable for a dance school that students could use to book lessons with and school admins manage. The app included justfew features such as students and teachers profile creation, lesson booking and lesson cancelling among others. I wanted it to be in that way since I'd recently started working with Express and my backend skills were not mature enough to produce a bigger project.
On the other hand, I decided to pay more attention to functionality on this project to have more time to get knowledge on areas like login security and deployment. That was time well spent since I always wondered how apps that needed a database worked in the internet and my knowledge on protecting profile details was limited to storing them in the client which is not a good practice.
Trying out Express.js overall experience was ok for me I'm afraid. I guess I didn't feel completely happy with it because I was never satisfied with the web development ecosystem available for Javascript. Its bloated libraries and modules were to me a source of annoyance. Fortunately though, I found out how to keep learning about backend development without them in the next project.