What-Skill-Should-Know-From-Other-Position.md

What skill should know from other position

Why

For me, as a backend engineer, all I need to do is writing my backend code, receive the quest, and finished it, that’s all.

But in reality, here’s some reason you can’t avoid these.

  • You need to cooperate with other people, such as frontend engineer, product manager, you don’t even know what they’re doing, it can be difficult to communicate.
  • Sometimes, your job is not only the backend, for my last job, I have to first figure out the need from client, and design a solution to solve it, then design UI/UX, database, and finally write the frontend and backend code.
  • To make your team better, make your product better, you can’t just know about backend.
  • If you want to be a team leader, you don’t need to be a master of all of these thing, but you have to know at least a little.

Frontend

As a backend engineer, frontend is the most frequent position you cooperate with.

Sometimes, your frontend partner is not familiar with backend, they don’t know the how the data from, data stored, what can backend api does and what can’t, so this is your job to come up with a solution.

But if you don’t know how to write frontend code, how does it work, then it could be difficult to have a good solution.

Frontend is the most time-taking skill, but also the most worth to invest on.

What you should know about frontend

  • Basic html, css, javascript
  • How to call api, render the view
  • Know about at least one popular framework

What you can know further more about frontend

  • The framework your team using, or as many as possible.
    • Vue2, Vue3, React, Angular, Next
  • Other tool your team using, such as element-ui, bootstrap, tailwind
  • Familiar with develop using vanilla js, but elegantly.
  • Familiar with develop using framework, know how the framework works
    • Lifecycle
    • SPA
    • The ways to store and transfer data
    • Component design
    • Design patterns

Product manager / Project manager

Except the boss, your jobs mostly are received from PM, sure you can do whatever they said, but sometimes, some of them don’t even know the basic of coding, database.

So, how design a product with reasonable solution to solve the problem is also your job.

What you should know about PM

  • Think carefully how you should design the product/feature.
    • If the customer said I want to search items about food, what will you do?
      • Design a page which is food page?

        What? you can’t just design a whole new page just because customer said so, what if others want other item categories? Have pages of every category?

      • Ok, so add category searching option in original search page.

        Ok, good

      • But what if food category is a popular category, I want to design some icons about popular categories such as computers, food, clothes in the home page, to make user more convenient to search what they want.

        Oh, in this way, then it’s a good reason to have a new page all about food items.

      • Hey, here’s another custom said he want to search toilet, let’s create another page for toilet!

        No! What? No…

  • How much time do engineer need to finish their jobs.
  • Learn about scrum.
  • How other product are designed.
  • Good documentation, communication.

What you can know further more about PM

  • Know why and how to run scrum.
  • Learn more about domain knowledge.

UI/UX

If can you come up with a solution that make backend and frontend easily to develop, then it will be great! And sometimes it’s better than originally.

But the product shouldn’t cut the features just because engineers said Oh... it's difficult to do it, so I denied it., the hell? Your job is to develop the product, not the product should be design for engineer easy to develop.

What you should know about UI/UX

  • Know other product design.
  • What most people tend to do, and how to make it better.

What you can know further more about UI/UX

  • Usability test design
  • UI/UX tools

DBA / DevOps

Same reason as frontend or even other skill, it can be

  • Part of your job
  • Make your team better
  • Make your job easily
  • Useful if you have your side project
  • Useful if you want to start you own business

What you should know about DBA / DevOps

Too many things to learn, currently can’t summarize what to learn, but anyway, these skills can be part of backend, learn as possible as you can!

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