As I continue on my DevOps journey, today marked an important step: understanding the backend development stack, specifically Node.js and Express.js. While I had already finalized the tech stack and even completed the frontend of my mini social media application, backend development was an area I hadn’t yet explored in depth.

📌 Why Node.js and Express.js?

In the modern web development ecosystem, Node.js is widely adopted for its event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, which makes it lightweight and efficient, ideal for building scalable network applications. Express.js, built on top of Node.js, is a minimal and flexible web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

Since the aim of this journey is not just to build, but to learn the internals and adopt the right practices from a DevOps standpoint, getting a proper understanding of backend technologies was crucial before proceeding with implementation.

🧠 What I Did Today

Today was completely dedicated to learning. Here's how I structured my time:

✅ 1. Studied the Fundamentals

• Understood what Node.js is and how it works under the hood.

• Learned about asynchronous programming in JavaScript and how it benefits backend services.

✅ 2. Explored Express.js

• Got familiar with the structure of an Express.js application.

• Learned how routing, middleware, and error handling works.

• Set up a basic server to test concepts locally.

✅ 3. Understood REST APIs

• Learned the principles of RESTful API design.

• Focused on how to create GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE routes to handle CRUD operations—something essential for the social media app.

✅ 4. Experimented with Tools

• Explored Postman for API testing.

• Installed and tested Nodemon for hot-reloading during development.

🔍 Why This Step Matters in My DevOps Learning Path

DevOps is not just about CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes, it starts from understanding the architecture of the systems you're deploying. If I don’t know how a backend works, how can I monitor, scale, or secure it?

By learning Node.js and Express.js, I’m laying the groundwork for:

• Writing modular, testable backend code.

• Implementing scalable services that can later be containerized and deployed.

• Integrating backend APIs with frontend seamlessly.

🚀 What's Next?

Now that I’ve gained enough foundational knowledge, tomorrow I’ll start writing the backend for my application. I’ll structure routes, connect with PostgreSQL (as planned earlier), and begin implementing authentication and user management features.