Since my journey in programming, I have mostly worked with the front-end. I did all my best to avoid working on the back end. “A front-end web developer”, I always replied when asked, “what do you do?”
Don’t get me wrong, I had it at the back of my mind that I was going to learn back-end development someday, just didn’t know how soon ‘someday’ was…Andela gave me no choice.
Funny thing is it hasn’t been as bad as I thought it was going to be, challenging, yes but really interesting. I’ve been working with Javascript for a while now so I thought it would be really cool if I could continue with Javascript on the back-end…enter Node.js.
Node.js is a tool that allows developers to write Javascript on the back end and it doesn’t come alone, no, it comes bearing gifts. One of such gifts is npm. npm is a package manager that comes with Node. It allows developers to choose and install packages from the thousands of packages that have been made available.
One of these packages is Express. Express is a lightweight framework that most developers work with when building applications. ‘Lightweight’ because it gives allows you to make as many customizations as you want, unlike some others (e.g. Ruby on Rails) that do most of the work for you.
There are also fun packages made available by npm. Cat-me helps you ASCII cats in your console (basically draws cats with different character combinations). Then there is knock-knock-jokes that just, as the name implies, outputs cheesy knock-knock-jokes.
There are lots of tools, from really silly and fun (cat-me), to really serious tools (Express) made available, and I have found that there are hardly any limits with Node. Hence I hope to continue working with this amazing tool and get much better in using it.
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