How software gets built
The first station. One feature travels from a text file on a laptop to the app in a customer's hand, and every word you hear in an engineering standup gets attached to a step of that journey.
Start here
How does software get built, start to finish?
The whole path in one guide: code, languages, frontend and backend, the database, the cloud, the release pipeline, and the team rituals that schedule all of it.
More in this topic
How does code become the app on my phone?
What code actually is, where it lives, and what a developer is looking at all day. The first lesson of the course, with nothing assumed.
What is a programming language, and do developers write all the code themselves?
Languages as trades rather than dialects, and the assembly model: most of an application is other people's work, chosen and connected.
What are frontend, backend, and an API?
The two halves of an application and the contract between them. The lesson where nodding along to the word API stops.
What is a database, and why is it its own specialty?
The thing every backend is guarding, why it is the second noun in almost every backend job description, and what a query is.
What is the cloud, and what do AWS and Google actually sell?
Where the code physically lives, who rents the machines, what infrastructure means, and what a hiring manager is saying when they say it does not scale.
What happens between writing code and shipping a feature?
The release pipeline end to end: commits, branches, pull requests, review, merge, environments, deploy. The spine of the whole course.
Why do bugs happen, and why is software never finished?
Tests, on-call, incidents, and technical debt. Why live software needs permanent care, and why developers ask for time to change things nobody can see.
What is a sprint, and what does Agile mean?
The rituals that schedule engineering work, and the vocabulary an intake meeting opens with.
Terms in this topic
- Agile
- Amazon S3
- API
- Automated testing
- AWS
- Azure
- Backend
- Background job
- Backlog
- Branch
- Bug
- Cache
- CDN
- CI/CD
- Clone
- Cloud
- Cloudflare
- Code editor
- Code review
- Codebase
- Commit
- Compiled language
- Cron job
- Data center
- Database
- Deploy
- Document database
- Dynamic typing
- Framework
- Frontend
- Google Cloud
- Horizontal scaling
- IDE
- Incident
- Infrastructure
- Interpreted language
- Latency
- Library
- Load balancer
- Merge
- Object storage
- On-call
- On-premises
- Package (dependency)
- Postgres
- Postmortem
- Product
- Production
- Programming language
- Pull request
- Queue
- Redis
- Refactoring
- Region
- Relational database
- Release
- Repository
- Rollback
- Runtime
- Scaling
- Server
- Shipped
- Sprint
- SQL
- Standup
- Static typing
- Technical debt
- Terminal
- Test-driven
- Throughput
- Ticket
- Vercel
- Vertical scaling
- VS Code
- Web app