Before you can begin designing complicated software programs, you must first learn the foundations of the programming language you intend to use. Programming languages can be classified into two main categories: front-end and back-end.

• Front-end programming languages create the user interface for a software application. Commonly known front-end programming languages include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Back-end programming languages power the functionality and logic of a software application. Common back-end programming languages include PHP, Java, and Python.

While front-end and back-end programming languages serve different purposes, they are often used to create a complete software application. This blog post can help you start experimenting with other languages and combinations to see what works best for you and the specific project you’re working on.

What we’ll cover:

• Front end vs Back end development
• Top front-end languages and frameworks
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • Vue
  • Angular
  • JQuery
  • TypeScript
  • Elm
  • How to become a front-end developer
• Top back-end languages and frameworks
  • Python
  • Java
  • PHP
  • Rust
  • Go
  • Ruby
  • C#
  • C++
  • Kotlin
  • How to become a back-end developer
• Conclusion

Front-end vs. back-end development

In the world of web development, there’s a debate between front-end and back-end development. Both sides have pros and cons. Front-end development is responsible for a website’s look, feel, and user experience. It uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the visual interface that users interact with. Back-end development is responsible for the server side of a website. It uses programming languages like PHP, Ruby, and Python to power the website and make it work. Both front-end and back-end development are essential to the success of a website. Front-end developers create the interfaces that users interact with, and back-end developers make those interfaces work.

Top front-end languages and frameworks

Building a website or application’s user interface and visual design is called front-end development. The front end is the website component with which the user interacts; therefore, the front end must be well-designed and user-friendly.

There are many advantages to front-end development: 

• It gives you complete control over the appearance and feel of your website or application. 
• It can make your website or application more user-friendly and give users a better experience. 
• Front-end development can help you improve your search engine optimization (SEO). 
• Front-end development can help you create a responsive design, which is essential for mobile users.

Let’s see one by one the top front-end languages and frameworks.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language (HTML), is a markup language used for structuring content on the web.

Features

Some of the features of HTML include being a markup language, which means it is used to “mark up” or annotate text documents so that they may be shown on a web browser.
HTML documents are made up of a series of elements represented by tags. HTML documents must be well-formed and conform to a set of rules to work.

Advantages and disadvantages

• It’s very easy to learn and use, making it ideal for those new to programming. 
• HTML is extremely adaptable. As such, it may be used to create various websites and online apps. 
• It is widely supported by web browsers, making it a good choice for those who want to create cross-platform applications.

Use cases

One of the most common uses of HTML as a programming language is to create web pages that users can view in a web browser. HTML code can create pages that include text, images, and links to other websites. Pages containing forms can also be made, which can be used to collect information from users.
Programmers can use HTML to develop web applications. Web applications are programs designed to be run on a web server and are accessible to users through a web browser.

Learn HTML with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about HTML, try these Cloud Academy courses:

• Basic HTML course
• Foundation of creating an HTML document
• Introduction to HTML elements

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language that is used to determine the appearance of a markup language document. A style sheet is a set of rules that informs a web browser how to display an HTML or XML document. CSS styles all HTML tags, including the document’s body, headers, paragraphs, and other content. CSS may also be used to design how table components, grid elements, and pictures are displayed.

Features

All HTML tags are styled using CSS, including the document’s body, headers, paragraphs, and other material.

CSS may also be used to customize the appearance of table components, grid elements, and images. Web developers can use CSS to create responsive designs that automatically adjust the layout of a web page to fit the dimensions of the device used to view it. CSS can also be used to create animations and other visual effects.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:

• CSS can style HTML tags, including the document’s body, headers, paragraphs, and other material.  
• It can style how table components, grid elements, and pictures are displayed.  
• It can create responsive designs that look great on mobile devices.  
• CSS can be used to create animations and other cool effects. 

Disadvantages: 

• CSS can be difficult to learn and use, especially for mobile responsiveness.
• Bugs can be difficult to find and fix. 
• CSS can be time-consuming to write and maintain.

Use cases

All HTML tags are styled using CSS, including the document’s body, headers, paragraphs, and other material. CSS may also be used to design how table components, grid elements, and pictures are displayed. Web developers use CSS to create responsive web designs. A responsive web design is a web design that is easy to read and navigate on all devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and desktops. CSS is also used to create animated web effects. CSS3, the latest version of CSS, includes features that allow developers to create animations and transition effects without using JavaScript or Flash.

Learn CSS with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about CSS, try these Cloud Academy courses and lab:

• Introduction to CSS Syntax
• Introduction to CSS Selectors and Properties
• Selecting HTML elements using CSS

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language most commonly used in web development. It’s a client-side scripting language, meaning the code is executed on the user’s computer. As a programming language, JavaScript is used to build interactive web pages and is considered a fundamental component of web development.

Features

• Dynamic typing in JavaScript allows variables to be declared without specifying their type. This means that the same variable may be used to contain values of various kinds throughout a program. 
• Weak typing means that JavaScript does not perform type-checking on variables. Weak typing can again lead to errors, but it can also be used to create more flexible programs that can work with data of different types.  
• JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance model differs from the classical inheritance model used by languages like Java. In the prototypal model, objects inherit directly from other things rather than from classes. This makes it possible to create objects without defining a category first.  
• JavaScript supports multiple programming paradigms. It is primarily an imperative and object-oriented language and supports functional programming. This means it can be used to write programs using different programming styles, depending on the project’s needs.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages: 

• It’s relatively easy to learn for beginners and has a forgiving syntax.
• It runs on all major browsers and platforms.
• It is a universal language and can be used for front-end and back-end development.
• It has a large community of developers who create libraries and frameworks to extend the language’s capabilities further.
• It is constantly evolving, with new features being added regularly.

Disadvantages:

• JavaScript is a client-side language, meaning that any code you write is viewable by the user. This can be a security risk as malicious users can view and alter your code.
• It can be challenging to debug as it is executed on the client side.
• It’s not a compiled language, meaning errors you make will only be discovered when you run your code.
• It lacks features of other programming languages, making it difficult to write large and complex applications.

Use cases

Some of the most popular applications built using JavaScript include: 

• Create interactive and online games. Many popular games have been built using JavaScript, such as Plants vs Zombies, Candy Crush, and Angry Birds. 
• Create desktop applications. Slack is a famous example of a desktop application built using JavaScript.  
• Create mobile applications. One famous example of a mobile application that is built using JavaScript is React Native.  
• Build server-side applications. One famous example of a server-side application that is built using JavaScript is Node.js.

Learn JavaScript with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about JavaScript, try this Cloud Academy learning path:

• JavaScript for beginners

React

React is a front-end library created by Facebook for building user interfaces and web applications. React is a declarative, fast, and adaptable JavaScript toolkit for creating user interfaces. It lets you create reusable components, making your code easy to read and maintain.

Features

• React lets you create reusable components, making your code easy to read and maintain.  
• It’s a declarative library, which means you can describe how your component should look without specifying how it should be implemented. 
• React is also efficient because it uses a virtual DOM (Document Object Model), a JavaScript representation of the real DOM. When a component is updated, only the changed parts of the DOM are updated instead of the entire DOM.  
• It’s flexible because it can be used with other libraries and frameworks. React is also easy to learn because it uses a syntax extension of JavaScript called JSX, which makes it easy to read and write React components.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• React is easy to learn for developers with JavaScript experience.  
• Its code is easy to read and understand. This makes it an excellent choice for teams working on large projects with many developers.  
• It’s fast and efficient. It uses a virtual DOM, making updating the UI quicker.  
• React is easy to scale. Because it is just a JavaScript library, it can be easily integrated into a project.   

Disadvantages:  

• React is a partially-fledged framework. This means that it lacks certain features that other frameworks have.  
• It’s only easy to learn for developers with a JavaScript background.  
• React has a steep learning curve. This is because it uses a lot of concepts that need to be more familiar to most developers.

Use cases

• User interfaces for single-page applications. 
• Landing pages for marketing websites. 
• Higher-order components for adding authentication to a component. 
• A composable component for a dropdown menu. 
• A presentational component for a data table. 
• A stateful component for managing the doughnut progress status for a multi-step form.

Learn React with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about React, try these Cloud Academy courses:

• React overview
• Introduction to React
• Testing in React

Vue

Vue.js is a JavaScript framework that makes creating complex, interactive applications easy. It provides various tools that make development quicker and more efficient.

Features

Unlike other frameworks, Vue.js is intended to be gradually adaptable, which means it can construct both small and sophisticated applications. Create simple applications as well as complex ones.
In addition, Vue.js also offers a range of features that makes it unique and well-suited for modern web development. 
Some of these features include: 

• Component-based architecture – developers can create self-contained and reusable components that are easy to maintain and test. 
• Virtual DOM enables it to be much faster than other frameworks that use full-page reloads or template compilation. 
• Data binding – VueJS allows you to easily bind data to your HTML templates, making your code more concise and declarative.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:

• Its lightweight size.
• Simple syntax.
• Support for various libraries. 
• Easy to learn for developers already familiar with JavaScript.
• Vue.js applications tend to be fast and responsive.

Disadvantages:

• Programmers less widely adopt it than other frameworks, so there’s less community support.
• Additionally, Vue.js doesn’t have as many features as some other frameworks.

Use cases

One of the reasons Vue.js is popular is that it makes it easy to create single-page applications (SPAs). SPAs are web programs that load a single HTML page and then update it dynamically based on user input. This makes them fast and responsive, like a native app, but they can also be more accessible to develop than a traditional multi-page web app. 

Another reason Vue.js is popular is that it can be used with various frameworks and libraries. This makes it a good choice for projects that need to integrate with other software. For example, Vue.js can be used with the Laravel PHP framework or the Node.js runtime environment.

Angular

Angular is a programming language for building web applications. It is a complete rewrite of the AngularJS framework developed by Google. The language is a TypeScript-based open-source front-end web application platform.

Features

Three features of Angular that make it powerful are:  

• Angular is a declarative programming language. This means that Angular code is easy to read and understand. Angular projects are also easy to refactor and maintain.  
• It’s a component-based programming language. This means that Angular code is organized into small, reusable components. This makes Angular code easy to reuse and maintain. 
• Angular is a two-way binding programming language. This means that Angular code can automatically update the view when the data model changes and vice versa. This makes Angular code very responsive and interactive.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:   

• It helps create dynamic and responsive user interfaces.  
• It can be used for developing both desktop and mobile applications.  
• It supports multiple programming languages, such as TypeScript, Dart, and JavaScript.  
• It has a large community of developers constantly working on improving the framework. 

Disadvantages:   

• It has a steep learning curve.  
• It is not easy to debug Angular applications.  
• It has a complex syntax.

Use cases

There are many real-world uses for the Angular programming language. One use case is for developing web applications. Angular can be used to create single-page applications or complex, multi-page applications.
Another use case is for creating mobile applications. Angular can be used to develop cross-platform mobile applications that can run on Android and iOS devices. 
Finally, Angular can also be used for creating desktop applications. Angular can be used to develop desktop applications installed on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

Learn Angular with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about Angular, try these Cloud Academy labs:

• Creating an Angular web application
• Developing applications using Angular

JQuery

JQuery is a lightweight, feature-rich JavaScript library. It simplifies HTML page navigation and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax with an easy-to-use API that works across many browsers. JQuery has altered how millions of people write JavaScript by combining flexibility and extensibility.

Features

• DOM Manipulation: JQuery provides powerful methods to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM).
• Event Handling: JQuery provides comprehensive event-handling support. This means that we can bind event handlers to elements very quickly and also trigger events on elements.  
• Animations and Effects: JQuery provides numerous methods to create animations and effects. This includes ways to show/hide elements, fade them in/out, etc.  
• Cross-Browser Compatibility: JQuery is well-supported across all major browsers. This means we can create websites and applications that will work well in all major browsers without issues.

Advantages and disadvantages

Some of the advantages of JQuery include the following: 

• JQuery can help make your website more user-friendly by providing built-in features such as drop-down menus and accordions. 
• JQuery can make your website more responsive and faster by lowering the amount of code that must be written, JQuery may make your website more responsive and quicker.
• Even individuals with little programming skills can learn and utilize JQuery.

Some potential disadvantages of JQuery include the following:  

• JQuery can make your website slower if it is not used carefully.  
• It can be difficult to debug because it is a JavaScript library.  
• JQuery can be over-used and add unnecessary complexity to your website.

Use cases

• One actual use case of JQuery is to create an image carousel.  An image carousel can be made by writing just a few lines of code using the JQuery library.   
• Another actual use case of JQuery is to create a slideshow.  This, too, can be accomplished by writing just a few lines of code.  Again, the slideshow can be set up to play automatically, or the user can be given the option to scroll through the images manually.

TypeScript

The TypeScript programming language is a superset of JavaScript, which means that all JavaScript code is valid TypeScript code. It allows developers to write code with types and modern features like classes, modules, and arrow functions.

Features

• TypeScript is a superset of typed JavaScript that compiles to ordinary JavaScript. 
• TypeScript, like C# or Java, is entirely object-oriented, with classes and interfaces, and is statically typed. TypeScript is JavaScript with a type information layer on top. 
• TypeScript supports all of the capabilities of JavaScript and TypeScript’s features, such as ECMAScript 6.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:

• TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to ordinary JavaScript, allowing it to operate on any platform, operating system, and browser. 
• It helps improve code quality and maintainability by catching common programming errors like misspelled variables, property names, and undeclared variables. 
• Its code can be organized into modules, which can be reused in other projects.
• The TypeScript compiler can generate source maps, which map the generated JavaScript back to the TypeScript code, making debugging easier.  

Disadvantages:

• TypeScript can be challenging to set up and configure, especially for JavaScript developers who are not used to working with type checking and compilation. 
• It can add significant overhead to your project, especially if you’re working on a large project with a lot of code.

Use cases

• Create large-scale applications. The static typing system ensures that the code is consistent and easy to refactor. This makes it an ideal choice for projects with many codebases or a need for solid tooling support. 
• Improve the development experience for JavaScript libraries. The type system can document the API and catch bugs early, which is especially useful for library maintainers who want to provide a high-quality experience for their users.

Learn TypeScript with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about TypeScript, try this lab and learning path from Cloud Academy:

• TypeScript – Zero to Hero learning path
• Programming with TypeScript

Elm

Elm is a functional programming language designed to make creating high-quality web applications easier. Elm is a statically typed language that uses type inference, meaning it’s unnecessary to declare explicitly the types of variables. This can make the code more concise and easier to read. Elm also strongly emphasizes immutability, meaning variables cannot be changed once set.

Features

Elm is based on the Function Programming Language (FPL) family of languages, characterized by their use of pure functions and immutability. This makes Elm programs easy to reason about and predict and is often more efficient than imperative programs.

• Compiles to JavaScript: Elm compiles to Javascript to run in web browsers. To assemble to Javascript, Elm uses the 1938 Wasm specification. This specification allows for a programming language that can be compiled into a format run in a web browser.
• Easy-to-use syntax: Elm has an easy-to-use syntax that allows developers to create web applications quickly. The syntax comprises simple, easy-to-learn commands that are easy to remember. This makes Elm ideal for building web applications without learning a complex programming language.
• Excellent type of system: Elm has an excellent type of system that can be used to check for errors in programs before they are run. This system can be used to check for type mismatches, and it can also be used to infer types for programmable values.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages: 

• Elm is a functional programming language that compiles JavaScript. It has excellent tooling support and a robust system that helps prevent program errors. 
• It’s easy for beginners and has a very straightforward syntax. 
• Elm programs are fast and reliable, thanks to the language’s excellent optimizing compiler. 

Disadvantages: 

• Elm has a small community, and few resources are available to learn the language. 
• It’s less widely adopted than other programming languages, so finding Elm developers can be difficult.

Use cases

• Creating user interfaces. Since Elm is a declarative language, it is well suited for creating UIs that are easy to reason about. Another use case for Elm is building web apps. 
• Elm’s compile-to-JavaScript functionality can be used in any JavaScript environment, and its functional programming paradigm makes managing complex states and data flow in web apps easy.

How to become a front-end developer?

You can become a front-end developer with the right skills and practice. One way is to get a degree in computer science or a related field. Another is to take an online course or attend a coding boot camp.

Top back-end languages and frameworks

Back-end development refers to the server-side development of a website or application. The back-end includes the server, the database, and the application and is responsible for the functionality of a website or application. It’s written in a server-side language, such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, or Java. 

Back-end development has many pros:

• It is faster and easier than front-end development. 
• Developers can focus on the functionality of the website or application without worrying about the design. 
• It’s more scalable than front-end development. 
• It’s more secure than front-end development.

Let’s see the top back-end languages and frameworks one by one.

Python

Python is a multipurpose programming language that has recently gained popularity for its ease of use. Python is popular for many projects, including web development, scientific computing, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more.

Features

• Python is an interpreted language. It uses an interpreter to execute code instead of compiling it into machine code.
• It’s a dynamically typed language. This implies you don’t have to define the kinds of variables when you declare them or anything. You can reassign a variable to a different data type, for example.
• Python is garbage collected. In Python, garbage collection reclaims the program’s memory that is no longer being used. This is done automatically by the Python memory manager.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• Python is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose programming language.
• It offers a variety of programming paradigms, such as procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming.
• It’s a popular programming language with many libraries and tools for scientific computing, data mining, and machine learning.
• It’s free and open-source software, with a large community of developers contributing to its development.

Disadvantages:  

• Python is only suitable for some programming tasks. For example, it is not recommended for system-level or low-level programming tasks.  
• It’s a dynamically typed language, which can lead to runtime errors.  
• The readability of Python code may be both a benefit and a drawback. Python code is frequently more understandable than code produced in other languages. However, Python’s syntax is commonly considered overly complex or peculiar.
• Python’s popularity might be a drawback since it can be challenging to locate skilled Python programmers, and Python code is frequently less portable than code produced in other languages.

Use cases

• Python is used in many different areas, including web development, scientific computing, data analysis, and artificial intelligence.
• It’s often used as a server-side scripting language in web development. Several famous web frameworks, including Django and Flask.
• Scientific applications in scientific computing.
• Data analysis and machine learning.

Learn Python with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about Python, try these Cloud Academy learning paths:

• Python for beginners learning path
• Pythonic programming learning path

Java

Java is a solid and adaptable programming language that allows developers to design robust, high-performance programs. Java is an object-oriented programming language with primitive data types. Java features reference kinds, such as class and interface types, array types, and enum types, in addition to primitive data types.

Features

• Java is a platform-independent language, meaning that programs can execute on any platform that supports it without needing recompiled.  
• It’s object-oriented and relies on objects and Classes to structure code. This makes code written in Java more modular and easier to maintain.  
• It has an extensive standard library, providing many common functions and data structures out of the box. This reduces the amount of code that must be written for many everyday tasks and promotes code reuse.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• Java is free and open source.  
• It’s platform independent. 
• It’s a powerful programming language.  
• It has a vast community of developers.   

Disadvantages:  

• Java can be slow and consume a lot of memory.  
• It has a steep learning curve.

Use cases

• Developing Android apps. 
• Back-end web development with frameworks such as Spring Boot.  
• Developing desktop applications with JavaFX.  
• Writing command-line utilities.  
• Build tools such as Gradle and Maven.

Learn Java with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about Java, try these Cloud Academy courses:

• Introduction to Java
• Essential Java programming
• Advanced Java programming

PHP

PHP used to stand for Personal Home Page, but it is now an abbreviation for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a popular open-source general-purpose scripting language ideal for web development. PHP code may be blended with HTML code or combined with other web template systems and frameworks.

Features

• PHP is a server-side programming language for creating dynamic web pages.
• Its code can be embedded into HTML code, making it easy to create dynamic web pages. 
• It has many built-in functions, making it easy to perform everyday tasks such as connecting to a database or sending an email.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• PHP code is executed on the server before the webpage is sent to the client. Users who access the website cannot see or modify PHP code.  
• It is a powerful programming language that can build many websites and web-based applications.  
• It can be used with many databases, making it a good choice for developing database-driven websites.  
• PHP code is often embedded into HTML code, making it easy to create dynamic web pages.  

Disadvantages:  

• As PHP code is executed on the server, it can strain the server resources, leading to slower page loading times.  
• If not used correctly, PHP code can be challenging to debug and can result in code that is hard to maintain.  
• As PHP is a scripting language, it is slower than compiled languages such as C++.  
• PHP is less widely used than other scripting languages, such as ASP.NET, making it more challenging to find skilled PHP developers.

Use cases

• Develop dynamic web applications.
• Connect to and manage databases. 
• Process form data. 
• Create cookies and sessions. 
• Generate the dynamic web page content. 
• Craddock functionality in web applications.

Rust

Rust is a back-end programming language that helps you write fast code that is both safe and concurrent. It achieves these goals by being memory-safe without using a garbage collector. This means you can avoid the dramatic pauses that can happen in a program that is otherwise running perfectly smoothly.

Features

• Rust is a statically typed language, meaning variables must be declared before they can be used. This allows the compiler to catch more errors at compile time and results in faster code. 
• It features a highly efficient garbage collector that works in the background and frees memory when it is no longer required. This removes the requirement for manual memory management while also strengthening the code. 
• It strongly focuses on safety and aims to be free of crash-inducing bugs. It has many features that help ensure safe code, such as ownership and borrowing.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• Rust is a programming language that is very lightweight and fast. 
• It’s an excellent language for systems programming. 
• It offers great memory safety. 
• Rust has outstanding support for concurrent programming. 

Disadvantages: 

• Rust is a very young language and thus lacks the robustness and stability of more established languages. 
• The Rust community is still tiny compared to other languages, so more support is needed.

Use cases

• Rust can be used for developing a wide range of applications, from web applications to network servers to system libraries to multitasking operating systems. 
• Its focus on safety, speed, and scalability makes it an excellent choice for developing concurrent and parallel applications. 
• Its static type system and ownership model prevent many common programming errors, such as null pointer dereferences and memory leaks. 
• Rust’s memory safety guarantees mean that it is memory-safe without needing a garbage collector, making it suitable for developing real-time and embedded systems.

Go

Go is a computer language that is statically typed and compiled, created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google. Go is comparable to C in syntax but has memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency.

Features

• Go is a statically typed language, meaning all variables must be declared with a specific type before they can be used. This can help to prevent errors and can make code more readable.  
• It’s a garbage-collected language that automatically manages the programmer’s memory. This can help to reduce memory leaks and can make code more readable.  
• Go has a simple syntax that can be easy for programmers from other languages.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• Fast compilation times. 
• Easy to learn and use.
• Garbage collection avoids memory leaks. 
• Excellent tooling and IDE support. 
• Excellent performance.
• Can be used for a wide range of tasks, from web development to system programming. 

Disadvantages:  

• No built-in support for threading. 
• No built-in support for networking.
• No built-in support for advanced graphics or multimedia.

Use cases

• Develop system tools like command-line applications or distributed services.  
• Develop web applications.  
• Develop game server backends.  
• Develop system daemons or other long-running processes.

Learn Go with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about Go, try this Cloud Academy course:

• Introduction to the Go programming language

Ruby

Ruby is a back-end programming language created in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto. Ruby is a universal language that can be used for creating web applications, system utilities, and even games. Ruby is free and open-source, meaning anyone can use and contribute to the language. Ruby is a reasonably simple language with syntax intended to be straightforward and accessible.

Features

• Ruby is a very concise and readable language. It is easy to write code that is both understandable and maintainable.  
• It has excellent support for metaprogramming, which allows for a great deal of code reuse and flexibility.  
• Ruby’s object model is simple and consistent, making it easy to understand and work with.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• Ruby is easy to learn and use, making it a great choice for beginners. 
• The syntax is clean and concise, making code easy to read and write. 
• It is a very versatile language, allowing developers to create a wide range of applications. 
• Ruby has a large and supportive community, which can be helpful when getting started with the language. 
• Ruby is open-source and free to use.  

Disadvantages:  

• Ruby is a relatively slow language, which can be a disadvantage when working on large or complex applications. 
• It’s not as widely used as some other languages, so finding experienced Ruby developers can be difficult.

Use cases

• Ruby on Rails is a popular Ruby-based web application framework. Many top sites, including Basecamp, GitHub, Shopify, and Airbnb, are all built using Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails provides a great way to develop robust web applications with minimal code quickly.  
• Another everyday use case for Ruby is data analysis and manipulation. The Ruby programming language makes it simple to read and write data from several sources. It also has several powerful libraries for performing data analysis, such as the RubyData and Statsample libraries. 
• Ruby is also commonly used for building command-line tools and utilities. Ruby’s syntax is compact and easy to comprehend, making it an excellent choice for writing tiny scripts to automate activities. The Ruby standard library includes several functional modules for working with files, network sockets, and databases.

C#

C# is a multi-paradigm programming language that supports imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming paradigms. Microsoft created it as part of its NET program. C# is one of the Common Language Infrastructure programming languages.

Features

• C# provides complete object-oriented programming capabilities, including encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.  
• It’s a type-safe language, which means that all C# code is checked for type safety at compile time. This prevents errors from happening at runtime.  
• C# comes with a sizable standard library, which provides a wide range of functionality. This includes support for networking, file input/output, and database access.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• C# is a clear language. It has a lot of features that are not available in other languages.  
• It’s easy to learn. If you know another programming language, you can learn C# quickly.  
• It’s well organized. The code is easy to read and understand.  
• It’s a compiled programming language. This implies that the code has been translated into machine language and is ready to be run.  
• C# is a safe language. The code is checked for errors before it is executed.  

Disadvantages:  

• C# is not a very portable language. It’s not easy to run C# code on other platforms.  
• It’s a closed language. This means that only Microsoft can add new features to the language.

Use cases

• Web applications because it is easy to learn and use. 
• Desktop applications and many game engines. 
• Create mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phones. 
• Create desktop apps for Windows and Mac. 
• Create web services and web APIs.

Learn C# on Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about C#, try this learning path from Cloud Academy:

• Introduction to C# programming

C++

C++ is an object-oriented programming language that allows developers to design complex software systems. C++ boasts many features that make it a highly versatile language, including type-safe memory management, exception handling, and templates. C++ is also widely used in applications where performance is critical, such as video games and high-performance computing.

Features

• C++ is an object-oriented programming language, which means that it allows you to create objects and programs that are organized around these objects. This makes C++ an ideal language for building large and complex software systems.  
• It’s a clear language, giving you much control over how your programs run. This may be both good and negative since it implies that C++ programs can be rapid and efficient, but they can also be challenging to debug and read.  
• Finally, C++ is a template-based language, meaning you can create template files that can be used to generate code for different types of data. When you need to, this may be a big time saver to create similar code for other data structures.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:  

• C++ is an object-oriented language, allowing for easy modularity and code reuse.  
• It has various features, such as templates and exception handling, which can make code more robust.  
• Its code can be easily linked to other libraries, allowing for greater functionality.  
• C++ compilers are available on many platforms, making it a portable language.  

Disadvantages:  

• C++ can be difficult to learn, especially for those without programming experience.  
• Its code can be difficult to read and understand, making maintenance and debugging challenging.  
• It can be less efficient than other languages due to the overhead of object-oriented features.  
• C++ programs can be prone to security vulnerabilities due to the language’s complexity.

Use cases

• Developing system software like an operating system or a compiler.
• Creating a domain-specific language.
• Developing video game engines. 
• Writing scripts to automate everyday tasks.

Learn C++ on Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about C++, try this learning path from Cloud Academy:

• C++ programming learning path

Kotlin

Kotlin is a programming language that is statically typed and may be used with the JVM, Android, JavaScript, and Native platforms. JetBrains is the company behind it. Kotlin is a language with roots in the Island of Java. While very similar to Java, Kotlin introduces some features that  Java does not have, such as null safety, lambdas, and operator overloading.

Features

• Kotlin is a general-purpose, statically typed programming language with type interference.
• It’s safe because it avoids null pointer exceptions by default. 
• Kotlin supports both object-oriented and functional programming.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages: 

• Kotlin is a statically typed language that can help reduce errors and enable more precise code. 
• It has a concise syntax that can make code more readable and easier to write. 
• It offers null safety to help avoid null pointer exceptions. 
• Kotlin can be used for both server-side and client-side development. 

Disadvantages: 

• Kotlin is a relatively new language, meaning a smaller community and less documentation is available. 
• It can be challenging to learn for Developers who are new to functional programming. 
• It requires a Java Development Kit (JDK) to be installed, which adds complexity for some developers.

Use cases

• Java developers can use Kotlin to write better code that is more concise and readable.  
• Android developers can use Kotlin to write more idiomatic and concise code.  
• Web developers can use Kotlin to write more expressive and concise code.  
• Kotlin developers can use Kotlin to write more type-safe and concise code.

Learn Kotlin with Cloud Academy

If you want to learn more about Kotlin, try this course and learning path Cloud Academy:

• Fundamentals of Kotlin
• Android App development with Kotlin

How to become a back-end developer

Tips to follow to become a back end developer: 

• Join or attend meetups for back-end developers. This is an excellent opportunity to network with other developers while learning about new technology.  
• Get involved in open-source projects. This is an opportunity to learn new technologies and gain experience working on real-world projects.  
• Read blog posts or watch video tutorials on back-end development. This is an excellent way to explore new technologies and keep up with the latest trends.  
• Follow back-end development news on Twitter. This is a great way to stay up-to-date with the latest news and trends.  
• Join a back-end development community or forum. This is a great way to get help from other developers and learn new technologies.

Conclusion

You should have now a comprehensive understanding of the main programming languages! Orienting yourself in the tech world isn’t easy, but this overview can help you begin or accelerate your tech career. And remember, you can go deeper into most of the topics through the Programming Training Library on Cloud Academy.

Happy Learning!

The post Programming Languages Overview: Front-end vs Back-end Development appeared first on Cloud Academy.

This means that Django comes complete with libraries and leans towards the monolithic working style. In comparison, Flask is lightweight without external libraries, meaning that it can be customized in ways to work well in a microservices architecture.

What is a Python framework?

A Python web framework is a set of modules or packages that allows developers to create web applications and services. It allows developers to focus on the high-level details that solve business needs, instead of spending time on more low-level details such as protocols and process/thread management.

As a developer, you’ll write code that conforms to a framework. This allows you to “plug in” the framework and delegate responsibility for low-level communications. Because you’re able to focus on the application logic in your code, your application creation is more efficient. In a nutshell, frameworks such as Flask and Django make it much easier to create web applications.

What is Flask?

Flask is a Python microframework. Flask includes a built in development server and unit-testing support. It’s fully Unicode-enabled, with RESTful request dispatching and WSGI compliance.

Flask is useful for small, straightforward applications. It allows you to manage your database in any way you want, such as using open-source toolkits like SQLAlchemy. Flask is used by many popular websites such as Pinterest and LinkedIn.

Features of Flask

Flask’s strength as a microframework is that it gives you the flexibility to choose what you need to build quickly. It has the following useful features that developers love:

• Lightweight framework: No external libraries
• Gives the developer full control over build decisions during the development phase.
• Has a built in server and debugger
• Thorough documentation for reference
• Easily understandable API
• RESTful and HTTP request handling
• Supports Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) templates for flexibility and scalability
• Has integrated support for unit testing
• Easy to deploy to production

What is Django?

Django is a Python web framework with high-level features that allows for rapid development of secure and easily maintainable websites. Django allows developers to focus on developing their application and not get bogged down in the infrastructure or administrative or technical details of web development.

Features of Django

Django is an open-source framework that can be used to create a variety of websites with different types of content. Django is a component-based framework. This means that each layer can be used independently, making it easy to scale your application at any level.

Some of Django’s key features are:

• Comes with many libraries, including ones for scientific calculations, imaging, graphics, user authentication and various other web 
• An inherent advantage to being Python-based, Django is portable 
• Highly secure web framework including robust user authentication
• At the lower level, the architecture is based around the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern which makes it mainatablble
• Scalable under high loads, thus suitable for big projects
• Well documented releases and bug reports

Resources: Get insights into Flask vs Django and more

Python for Beginners: Are you new to coding? This learning path breaks down the core concepts of Python and shows you its flexibility and power. Use these courses, labs and exams as a foundation to working with Flask or Django.

Python based Microservices – Go from Zero to Hero: Want to get more real-life examples of how Flask fits in a modern microservices deployment? This learning path guides you through the process of quickly prototyping and building microservices, then deploying them with Docker.

Continuous Integration with Jenkins: This course demonstrates a project to build and test a Django application. You’ll learn how an application like this can fit within the continuous deployment process with Jenkins – a valuable real-life example.

FAQs

Is Flask easier than Django?

Flask is easier to learn than Django especially for newer users because Flask is a simpler framework and therefore has fewer abstraction layers. For long-term experience, it’s beneficial to learn both frameworks and make the most out of their advantages.

Is Django better than Flask?

Really, they are different since Django is a full framework with libraries and Flask is a lightweight microframework without libraries. Some differences to note are that Flask supports APIs, while Django does not. Django supports dynamic HTML pages, while Flask does not. 

Is Django or Flask more popular?

If you judge by their Github ranking, both frameworks are about equally as popular. For users who are focused on a quick end goal, Django is more popular than Flask because it offers many features out of the box and makes it easier to create complex applications. If you want a nuanced fully customizable solution, then Flask is better because by definition it needs customization from the development team, making it fit your problem perfectly.

​

The post Flask vs Django: Which Python Framework is Best? appeared first on Cloud Academy.

For a complete newbie, if you want to build things is starting with C# a good way to go?

HALLAM: C# is an excellent language to learn for a number of reasons. It is syntactically similar to several other mainstream and well-established languages such as C (obviously 🙂 ), C++, and Java. Java and C++ are also object-oriented languages, so those skills are transferable. C# uses the .NET Core runtime stack making applications cross platform as .NET Core is supported on macOS, Linux, and obviously Windows. Because .NET and C# go hand in hand, .NET skills are easily transferred to other languages like Visual Basic.

What types of things can you build with C#… is it better for certain use cases such as web applications?

HALLAM: There isn’t much you can’t build with C#. Depending on the framework, you can target mobile, Android, and iPhone using Xamarin, website, and services with ASP.NET and the Windows desktop. You can even develop for the macOS desktop using Visual Studio for mac in conjunction with Xcode. There are even open source platforms for developing desktop GUI apps for Linux. C# can be used for XBOX game development, and even low-level PCB programming.

What are the main advantages of C#, .NET, etc.?

HALLAM: Apart from cross-platform development, it is a mature and well-supported language with a vast array of libraries supplied by Microsoft and third parties. One of its main advantages is the excellent tooling in the form of Visual Studio for Windows and macOS and cross-platform VSCode with the C# extension.

Is there any need for someone to learn C? Will you be at a disadvantage if you don’t know it / haven’t had ANY experience with C or C++?

HALLAM: Short answer: no. I moved from Delphi, after initially learning Pascal, to C#. Delphi is similar in terms of being object-oriented, but syntactically a little different. Since programming in C#, I’ve written code in C++ and Java.

Why bother with C# / .NET if you’re working on a Mac?

HALLAM: If you’re developing exclusively for the Mac desktop, then I can’t think of a good reason, but who does that? Cross-platform and online services are the future for most development, and the combination of C# and .NET Core has those bases covered.

What sorts of things have you built with C#? 

HALLAM: As an example of its extreme versatility, I developed software that controlled an industrial vending machine and the Azure-hosted web services the vending machines communicated with. So, that’s code controlling hardware on the machine and synchronizing stock and sales data with an Azure-hosted database application. I also built a website for people to manage and report on their vending machines.  

You’ve mentioned that your Practical Introduction to C#Programming learning path has examples of “how to integrate and leverage Azure cloud technology.” Can you give some of the examples that you like the best?

HALLAM: C#, .NET, Visual Studio and Azure are all Microsoft technologies, so there is tremendous integration between them. When you throw in Azure DevOps, you can have a seamless CI/CD pipeline allowing you to very easily manage the software development life cycle employing agile techniques. It’s the tool integration that I like the most. The ability to create and deploy apps from within the Visual Studio environment. Apart from web services and websites, almost all Azure services allow custom code support C#, ranging from Azure functions to IoT event hub triggers. 

In your last answer, you mentioned creating and deploying apps from within the Visual Studio environment. What are some courses that you think illustrate these concepts well?

HALLAM: Getting Started with Azure App Service details several easy ways to deploy an application to Azure from Visual Studio. App security has never been more important and Managing Application Configuration and Secrets describes how to develop applications with flexible and secure configurations within Visual Studio. Visual Studio can securely access Azure-based resources, and that secure access is seamlessly transferred to the cloud when deploying to Azure.

For an entry-level dev or someone in university, what would be a comparable or competing language someone might learn? For example, would someone say, “I’m not gonna learn C#, I’m just gonna build things with Python…” — and if so, why do you think people would not choose to learn C#?

HALLAM: From a technical perspective, Java is comparable in both syntax and the use of a runtime environment to allow applications to run on multiple platforms. Python is popular due to its shallow learning curve and that it’s not perceived as being aligned to a big tech company. I think there is this perception that using a Microsoft product is somehow going over to the “dark side” and you are in some way betraying the open-source ethos. Nothing could be further from the truth. .NET is now pretty much open source and very good and well-supported development environments are free. There is nothing stopping someone from using C# and .NET along with freely available databases from building a production-level system.

If your company is using compute instances that are not Windows, i.e., Linux, for web servers or for building and deploying applications, are you at a disadvantage by specializing in C#?

HALLAM: Depends what you comparing C# to. If it’s an interpreted scripting language like Python, then no. C# and .NET run on Linux. Many of the demos I’m doing in the Introduction to C# learning path are on a Linux box. C++ is always going to be the go-to language for getting down and dirty with the operating system and achieving ultimate performance, but that performance needs to be traded off against development productivity. C++ is a more complex language but is the syntactic origin of C#. 

Are there any other common disadvantages, and ways to overcome them?

HALLAM: The only place C# falls short is GUI desktop development for Linux and macOS, although there are apps that are addressing this issue with greater sophistication. C# is continually being developed, refined, and adapted to new platforms. A relatively recent and exciting platform addition is Blazor, allowing C# developers to build Web Assembly apps to run in the browser, sometimes with functionality complementary to JavaScript, or sometimes completely replacing JavaScript.

The post The Benefits of C# and .NET — Even on macOS appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Let’s suppose you are a developer. Now let’s suppose you are a front-end developer. Imagine that you have been recently hired to perform this role in a company that has a large, complex React web application. You see that managing such a complex application is a struggle. You don’t understand the actual flow of information, you see that there’s some inexplicable logic that you are afraid to touch, there’s a deep component nesting architecture, and so on.

If someone told you to make some changes in this codebase, this would probably be your reaction: 😱.

But you recall hearing from some wise white-haired man that there’s a way to manage such complexity. That man used a specific word to address this problem: refactoring! This is typically done when you want to rewrite a piece of code in a simpler way, breaking the logic into smaller chunks to reduce complexity.

Before you proceed, you remember that this is a very complex application. How can you be sure that you’re not breaking anything? You recall something else from the wise old man: testing!

Our choice for front end

At Cloud Academy, we have our large complex application built on a stack composed of React/Styled Components/Redux/Redux saga. The sagas are responsible for making the Rest API calls and updating the global state, while components will receive that state, updating the UI accordingly.

So, given our React stack, our choice was:

• jest as test runner, mocking and assertion library
• @testing-library/react or enzyme for unit testing React components (depending on the test purpose, or the project)
• cypress for end-to-end testing (which will not be covered in this article)

Testing Library vs. Enzyme

Even though these two libraries both result in testing React components, they differ significantly in how the test is performed.

• Enzyme focuses testing on implementation details, since you need to know the internal structure of the components and how they interact with each other. This gives you more control over the test execution, enabling deep testing on state and property changes. However, it makes the tests brittle, since almost every modification to the implementation needs a test update. Generally speaking it can be useful when testing simple components in which you have some logic that you don’t want to be altered, or with less component aggregation and interaction and more focused on content rendering. We use Enzyme in our design system Bonsai library.

• Testing Library for React focuses on how the components behave from a user standpoint. To perform the test, you don’t need to know the implementation details, but rather how it renders and how the user should interact with it. This enables testing of very complex components. Since you don’t need to be concerned about the internals, you only need to give meaningful props, mock dependencies where needed (independent from the chosen framework), and test the output, checking what you expect to be rendered (content, labels, etc.) or interacting as a user would. We use Testing Library for React in our main application project, with which you can test whole pages without worrying too much about their complex structure.

Let’s dig into how we perform tests our main React codebase leveraging Testing Library.

What should you test?

We can see our application structured in different layers:

• Global state and API calls located in Redux layers (actions, reducers, sagas, selectors)
• Business logic and state management in containers (or for more recent components in hooks)
• Presentation logic in lower level components
• Common utilities

Each of these layers deserves a thorough tour about how they should be tested, but this article is focused on how we test React layers, so we’ve identified four main categories of tests:

• Containers: the most complex components, where you usually test behaviors and you need heavy use of dependency stubs and fixtures
• Components: since they should be “dumb,” testing here should be simpler
• Hooks: see them like “containers” as functions, so you have the same needs and same containers approach
• Generic functions: not really bound to Testing Library, but still needed when you use them in components

Containers

This is usually the page entry point, where all the magic happens by provisioning the actual data to the underlying components and controlling their actions with callbacks.

A complete test usually needs:

• Dependencies properly mocked (leveraging jest mocks and dependency injection)
• Fixtures to mock data and make assertions (expectations on content can be done with them)
• Stub actions or callbacks in order to assert the behavior of the interactive parts using spies, etc. (e.g., error notifications, browser events, API callbacks)
• Manage or simulate asynchronicity

If the test is well prepared, assertions are very easy, as you probably just need to inject the fixture data and check if it’s rendering like you expect. This ensures fairly wide coverage of the internal components, without taking into account the implementation details.

One suggested practice is to test at least the “happy path” and the “error” situations. Testing all the other possible code branches is also highly recommended, but only after the most common paths have been covered.

beforeEach(() => {
  ...
  mockHistory = createMemoryHistory();

  initialState = {
    ....
     //some content here
     course: {
        description: '.....'
        nextStep: {
           title: '....'
        }
     }
     ...
  };
});

test('should render the course step content from the state', () => {

  connectedRender(
    <Router history={mockHistory}>
      <ContainerWithSomeContent  />
    </Router>,
    {
      initialState,
      reducer,
    },
  );

  expect(screen.getByText(initialState.course.description)).toBeInTheDocument();

  expect(screen.getByText(`Next: ${initialState.course.nextStep.title}`));
});

Connected components

Let’s take a small detour through how to test connected components. As you see above, the test is using the connectedRender API. This is a utility function to enable testing on containers that are connected to Redux store without having to set up its boilerplate code in every test.

In order to test those kind of components, you simply need to pass these items to this utility function: the jsx, the reducer and the initial state that will be used to construct the store that will forward the state using the redux Provider.

The following is the implementation of that utility.

import React from 'react';
import { render as rtlRender } from '@testing-library/react';
import { createStore } from 'redux';
import { Provider } from 'react-redux';

function render(
  ui,
  {
    initialState,
    reducer,
    store = createStore(reducer, initialState),
    ...renderOptions
  } = {},
) {

  function Wrapper({ children }) {
    return <Provider store={store}>{children}</Provider>;
  }
  return rtlRender(ui, { wrapper: Wrapper, ...renderOptions });
}

// re-export everything
export * from '@testing-library/react';
// override render method
export { render as connectedRender };

Components

Given that the “happy path” is being tested on the container, there’s the possibility that you don’t need to perform tests on the internal components, that should be dumb as much as possible. If some kind of logic is present here (e.g., displaying different labels depending on props values), it’s also good to create tests to cover these specific situations, handling them here instead of containers.

If you have many possible combinations, a suggested practice is to write tabular tests.

test.each`
  time  | expected
  ${0}  | ${'0 minutes'}
  ${1}  | ${'1 minute'}
  ${2}  | ${'2 minutes'}
  ${10} | ${'10 minutes'}
`('should render estimated time "$time" as "$expected"', ({ time, expected }) => {
  props.estimatedTime = time;

  render(<ComponentThatRendersTime {...props} />);

  expect(screen.getByText(expected)).toBeInTheDocument();
});

Hooks can be tested without being forced to render them inside components using renderHook from @testing-library/react-hooks library. Testing hooks is somewhat similar to testing functions and components at the same time.

The hook returns a result object on which you can make assertions by accessing its current property.

You should avoid immediate destructuring here if you are planning to call a function on the result that changes the hook state. In fact, this triggers the library to re-render the result, assigning a new reference to the result.current property.

//render the hook
const { result } = renderHook(() => useSomeSuffWithChangeableState())

//read its result value
const { changeState, value } = result.current

// if you expect to change the state here and have an updated value
act(() => {
  changeState()
})
// this assertion will fail, since the "value" will still be the old one
expect(value).toEqual(..)

// to assert the new value you need to re-read it
expect(result.current.value)

Generic functions

Generic functions usually don’t need anything from react testing library, since no jsx rendering should happen inside of them. In this case, you can simply assert using standard matchers, again with tabular testing if needed.

test.each`
  status            | expectedMessage
  ${'not_booked'}   | ${'Classroom Not Booked'}
  ${'booked'}       | ${'Classroom Booked'}
  ${'waiting_for'}  | ${'Classroom Booked'}
  ${'attending'}    | ${'Classroom Started'}
  ${'ended'}        | ${'Classroom Ended'}
  ${'not_existing'} | ${'Classroom Not Booked'}
`(
  'should display "$expectedMessage" for status "$status"',
  ({ expectedMessage, status }) => {
    const message = getMessageFromStatus(status);

    expect(message).toBe(expectedMessage);
  },
);

test('should load the page properly', async () => {

  //here's an async operation since the component immediately loads the data
  render(
      <ContainerWithAsyncCall
        {...props}
      />
  );

  await waitFor(() => {
    expect(screen.getByText("Text in the document")).toBeInTheDocument();
  });

  // ...other expectations

});

test('should load the data properly', async () => {
  //render the hook
  const { result, waitForNextUpdate } = renderHook(() => useHookWithAsyncOperation())

  expect(result.current.status).toEqual('LOADING');

  // if you expect to change the state here and have an updated value
  await waitForNextUpdate(() => {
    // assert on the updated "current" value
    expect(result.current.status).toEqual('LOADED')
  })
})

const mocks = [{
  request: {
    query: GET_SURVEY_INFO_QUERY,
    variables: {
      ...variables
    },
  },
  result: {
    data: {
      ...mockData,
    },
  },
}]
test('should load the page without errors', async () => {

  render(
    <MockedProvider mocks={mocks} addTypename={false}>
      <SurveyLandingContainerInternal {...props} />
    </MockedProvider>
  )

  await waitFor(() => {
    // ...assertions
  })
})

export function newMockUseQuery({ error, data }) {
  return jest.fn(function () {
    const [state, setState] = useState({
      loading: true,
      error: undefined,
      data: undefined,
    });

    useEffect(() => {
      async function doFakeQuery() {
        await Promise.resolve();

        setState({
          loading: false,
          error,
          data,
        });
      }
      doFakeQuery();
    }, []);

    return state;
  });
}

let mockUseQuery;

jest.mock('@apollo/client', () => {
  // needed in order to avoid mocking everything if importing other stuff
  const apolloClient = jest.requireActual('@apollo/client');
  return {
    ...apolloClient,
    useQuery: (...args) => {
      return mockUseQuery(...args);
    },
  };
});

//while in the test setup just do
beforeEach(() => {
  mockData = {
    ...
  };
  mockUseQuery = newMockUseQuery({ data: mockData });
});

The post Front End Testing 101 at Cloud Academy appeared first on Cloud Academy.

It’s that sinking feeling in your gut of fear and worry about another missed deadline. But what if the project is mission critical? You must find a way to achieve your goals even if you don’t know if you have the talent on your team right now. And you need to use your budget wisely to generate results, fast.

So, you consider your options. Hiring cycles for specialty tech talent are both slow and expensive, and that’s before onboarding even begins. You can start looking for the right people with the right mix of interpersonal and technical expertise, but that timeline is really out of your control — and the clock is ticking.

Taking a step back… could your team execute if they were given the proper tools to upskill quickly?

Putting a stop to the guesswork

The first step in forecasting your skill requirements is to fully understand where your team sits versus where it needs to be to execute against current and future business objectives. This knowledge will give you the confidence to make the right decisions with regard to investing internally or looking for talent on the open market. But where to begin?

Cloud Academy provides the answer to the question, “What are my team’s current tech skills?” with our accurate and objective tech skill assessment tool. Use our out-of-the-box assessments or create a custom version to test and validate on topics including:

• Cloud computing: AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba
• Software engineering: Python, Java, React, and more
• Big data: Machine learning (ML), Artificial intelligence (AI)
• DevOps
• Security

Sounds good. What next?

In addition to assessing your team, Cloud Academy for Business helps you recommend and assign the training plans you need to take individuals’ skills to the next level. We are nothing like other e-learning platforms that outsource their content, don’t curate it properly, and leave skills development to the whim of employees’ motivation.

Cloud Academy is a software company built on the premise that an investment in the skills growth of your workforce should have a direct, positive, and measurable effect on operational goals. And that without accountability via regular evaluation, training programs are bound to fail.

With our platform, managers and administrators can set expectations around timelines that promote programmatic upskilling, establishing defined job roles with career progression tracks, and better execution on business objectives — all in a predictable and scalable way — whether you have two employees or tens of thousands. This method of shared accountability promotes team growth, improved retention, and a culture of success.

Our in-house content team consists of tech experts around the globe who continually create new and refresh existing educational assets. This means the learning paths, hands-on labs in live environments, quizzes, exams, and certifications that you assign your team are always up to date. Not to mention, our dedicated customer success team works with you to help you identify the right priorities and the best path forward for getting your squad to where it needs to be.

Try Cloud Academy’s Enterprise Plan for 2 weeks free

For registrations from May 17 until May 31, 2021, we’re offering your business unlimited access to the Cloud Academy platform for 14 days at no cost. Start by assessing your team’s skills, and explore the upskilling potential enabled by our library of content. We’ll be there to help you every step of the way.

Don’t miss out! Click here to get started.

The post It’s 10:00 AM: Do You Know Where Your Team’s Tech Skills Are? appeared first on Cloud Academy.

It’s a typical Monday morning, and I am about to get off the TILO train that takes me to Cloud Academy’s offices in Mendrisio every morning.

It’s 8:36 a.m. sharp (lovely how punctual Swiss trains are), and I am walking to the office to start a new day. 🥳

As I walk towards my desk to plug in my MacBook, I greet the other early morning coworkers who are already in the office and then make my way to our awesome espresso coffee machine to get my first caffeine fix of the day.

Now that the caffeine ☕️  is starting to do its magic, I proceed to open up the WebStorm IDE to spin up my dev environment while I also take a quick look at my Google Calendar to get a feeling of what the day is gonna look like, and finally check the Jira board to see what the current progress of my tasks is.

9.45 a.m. – Time for the daily stand-up!

The engagement squad (my current team 😎) is ready to report the various updates regarding what everybody has been up to since yesterday, and we have a 10/15-minute scrum meeting to discuss our tasks for the day and whether or not we have any particular blockers for the issues we’re currently working on.

10:00 a.m. – Back to work ⚙️

Today I’m working on adding a custom functionality to a React Component that I am currently building (i.e., the Card Certification), which is related to our upcoming User Certifications project (edit: it’s now live! 🥳) that’s going to enable both enterprise customers and individual users to upload their custom certifications to CA’s platform.

I am actually working on including the “add to LinkedIn” functionality so that when users click on the corresponding card button, it will be possible for them to be redirected to the related LinkedIn profile page with all of the main certification’s details already pre-filled.

Below is the actual code snippet with the main parameters that I am using to connect to LinkedIn’s add to profile endpoint so as to fill out the required fields.

1:00 p.m. – Time for some lunch! 🥪

I sit in our kitchen/lunch area and enjoy the quick lunch I brought from home while having a nice conversation with my peers.

Today is also a very special day because we’re celebrating the birthday of a CA employee, and this means only one thing….🥁 free brioches for everybody! 🥐

This is one of my favorite traditions here at Cloud Academy, as birthdays are always properly celebrated with the right level of sweetness 😉

1:30 p.m.  – Time to play table tennis! 🏓

After the lunch break, some of us generally gather and then split into small teams to play table tennis together. It’s such a nice way to recharge before going back to coding.

Today I feel quite energized (might be the caffeine + brioche combo), and I actually win the match! 🙌🏻

2:00 p.m. – Back to work again 💼

Time to get back to coding. I am moving forward with the implementation of the “add to LinkedIn profile” functionality for the certifications, and I am testing out whether the actual flow of interaction works as expected and that all of the fields are correctly being filled out whenever a user clicks on the corresponding button with the goal of showcasing a new certification on LinkedIn.

4:00 p.m. – Let’s push some code! 🤓

After having properly debugged and checked that everything works as it should, I proceed to open a pull request on Bitbucket and pick two front-end colleagues as reviewers so that they can give me some feedback on my work.

Providing useful and actionable feedback is definitely one of the main key points to follow when it comes to reviewing pull requests, and we all strive to be as assertive as possible whenever we write comments on other pull requests so that we can all learn something in the process.

5:00 p.m. – PR reviews time 📝

I am now reviewing a pull review on our Design System’s repo (i.e. Bonsai) for a new Component that is being created. I am curious to take a look at my colleague’s work, since I find it truly interesting to see how other developers tackle a certain problem from different viewpoints and to understand more about how I would have approached the same challenge.

It’s always quite interesting to analyze the pros and cons of certain types of potential solutions, and with Bonsai we are trying to stick to a reasonable balance between the need of meeting certain technical standards while remaining sufficiently close to the actual design requirements.

As an example, some of the guidelines that we are adhering to when it comes to designing new Bonsai Components are outlined in our docs page, where we have created a specific definition to differentiate between “ready-to-use” components and what we have named “stylable” components.

Creating a new “ready-to-use” component (we mostly use those) means that its corresponding TypeScript interface will have its basic style and corresponding functionalities already defined, so that a Developer can quickly and easily use it as it is.

6:00 p.m. – Wrapping up

Another workday has come to an end, and it’s now time for me to hop on the train back to Italy 🇮🇹  and relax and unwind a bit.

The post A Day in the Life of a Front-End Engineer at Cloud Academy (When There’s Not a Pandemic) #DevStories appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Here at Cloud Academy, we have recently been evolving our back-end architecture. We took the path toward a microservices architecture, and we’re still working on some pillars that will enable us to become faster in development while gaining overall reliability and stability. 

Many projects are contributing to the core foundation of Cloud Academy’s new architecture, since we are working on different topics such as authentication and authorization and event-driven communication between microservices, along with some improvements to the infrastructure. 

In this scenario, we have also introduced GraphQL as the abstraction layer between services and their clients. Initially developed in Facebook, GraphQL is now an open-source query language for APIs. It means that the client can define the structure of the data it requires, reducing the amount of data transferred between client and server. GraphQL provides stable interfaces for querying and mutating objects on the back-end services through the definition of a schema, which is the contract between the front end and back end. This solution is particularly effective to hide the complexity of the back-end systems to the front end: this is something we wanted to introduce into our architecture to ease its evolution. 

Think big, start small

Once we decided to introduce GraphQL into our architecture, we planned how to do that safely. First of all, we conducted a spike to dive deep into GraphQL, and we evaluated the right technology for our needs.

We compared Java, NodeJS, and Python, with the latter emerging as the stack that best fit our needs, not only because it is the main language of our back-end stack but also because it also satisfied our performance requirements. 

Once we agreed on the technological choices, we decided to test GraphQL in production to gain confidence with this technology and spot issues as soon as possible. Given these premises, we chose a feature that wasn’t crucial for the business but still generated a considerable amount of traffic: learning path’s certificates generation. If you’re not familiar with Cloud Academy’s learning paths, you should take a look at our website or start a 7-day trial to explore all our features and to test our GraphQL server as well. 

Back to our subject: We successfully rolled out a GraphQL query and a mutation, and we were pretty satisfied with them, so we confirmed the adoption of this technology in our stack. We started onboarding all the squads and spreading the usage of GraphQL by making it the default choice for all the new endpoints and enforcing its introduction on the existing ones. 

Next steps

After a few months, we noticed that the library we relied on (graphene-python) did not offer a set of commodities such as query cost analysis, the schema-first approach support. In addition to this, graphene library has recently been abandoned by its principal contributor. For these reasons, we decided to move toward a more stable solution, switching to the de facto standard for GraphQL: Apollo Server. This choice will allow us to get the most out of GraphQL features, also giving us the possibility to set up a federated architecture to isolate GraphQL servers and avoid having a single instance covering all our needs. We will “start small” in this case as well: We will follow the same approach we used to introduce GraphQL into our architecture. We’re currently working on the first queries in Apollo Server, and we’re going to release them in a few weeks. The journey continues… 

The post Our Journey to GraphQL appeared first on Cloud Academy.

At Cloud Academy, we have some frontend apps with a lot of components created using principles of Atomic Design. At first, we thought it was the best choice for us, but in these three years we noticed some drawbacks:

• Initial atoms or molecules didn’t reflect the concept of atom and molecule. Adding props and styles every time we touched a common component interface broke that rule and we didn’t have common rules or guidelines when editing them — if I needed a new boolean prop I would simply add it and set the inverse value as default where that atom is used.
• Different pages or site sections had similar designs, but we incorrectly used two components or more. For example, we had different tab components!
• We didn’t have common design guidelines, and buttons shapes were different among different pages (different font sizes for label and icons, different colors, and behaviors).
• Without having an updated list of what we had, it was difficult to easily reuse them. We didn’t have a visual list of what we had, so the Design Team and our internal stakeholders used to propose different versions of the same components every time (and often we discovered it only after designs were approved).

We initially considered and evaluated various UI toolkits, but they were too vague or complex for us, so we decided to start from scratch and create one which fits perfectly our needs and guidelines. We wanted to have a common style and common behaviors across our products without either doing CSS magic or adding additional props on components. Plus, we wanted to start a smaller project using TypeScript before migrating bigger repositories (we use vanilla Javascript in our main React projects at the moment).

So the birth of Bonsai, our UI library, was introduced.

The basics

Before we dive into our UI journey, let’s start with the basics. If you’re already an expert on these topics, feel free to jump right into the story. A UI library (also called a component library) is a repository that contains all reusable components and interactions to ensure consistency across a brand and product. Typically, a group of UX designers, software engineers, and product managers work together to create it and its purpose is to compose layouts in no time: it should be easy to use and offers a lot of prebuilt components in order to spend less time on the visual phase of the development.

To get familiar with React, check out Cloud Academy’s ReactJS: Zero to Hero Learning Path. This guided learning experience provides a complete guide to building scalable web applications using Facebook’s popular ReactJS library. If you have intermediate JavaScript and ES6 skills, you can jump into a guided hands-on lab: Developing Applications Using ReactJS. In this real lab, you’ll log in directly to the Microsoft Azure Portal and will be guided throughout the process of developing applications using ReactJS to create reusable, interactive UI components.

Our first steps into a new world 

Last year, we set the goal to entirely refactor one of our biggest product codebases: Training Plans. Working together with our Design Team from the beginning helped us to define our first basic components which need to be reusable everywhere on the platform.

Our biggest challenge was getting a consensus between our frontend engineers. We had a lot of meetings where we discussed strict guidelines that everyone had to follow and we argued sometimes on some concepts, but now we have a shared common vision on how we want to work with this UI library.

UI library base rule

Our base rule is:

When using a common component you don’t need to stylize it or add additional props by extending it; otherwise, you are going to repeat the same mistakes we made at the beginning.

These mistakes include duplication of code, duplication of similar components that differ slightly one from another, and uncertainty on which component you need for your feature.

We use styled-components library from the first line of code we wrote more than three years ago, so we are going to continue using it. In order to follow our golden rule, we don’t want to expose the className prop outside when importing one of the components we created, so we are 100% sure our button with primary palette will be always blue (obviously you can still overwrite our rules using CSS descendants). For particular cases, we extend the base element props with the famous className one and export a styleable version of that component (see the reference for link one).

The TypeScript factor

As I said before, we started the Bonsai UI library project from scratch using create-react-app and TypeScript.

Why TypeScript?

TypeScript pros and cons can be found with a Google search, and probably too long to discuss in this post. In short, in our case, TypeScript:

• Helped a lot using interfaces for defining prop types. Shared interfaces can be used among different components and can be extendable with additional fields or interfaces, and the code is cleaner and easier to understand. For example: printUser (name: String, dob: Date): String is pretty explanatory than reading the whole function code and understand what it accepts and what it could be returned.

  

• Using types and not observing them lead the TypeScript compiler to throw errors. While we still use prop-types library in React, for me it’s not enough to prevent errors while passing data from one component to another so the typedef compilation check saved us a lot of time in future fixing bugs.

  

  

• Some of us have more of a back-end background, and so they are used to typed languages. TypeScript is a superset for Javascript, so if you already know Javascript, learning TypeScript is not a big deal.
• Having knowledge on what is the current trend in the Javascript ecosystem, as reported in Javascript Flavors.

After our initial attempt, it now won’t be so difficult starting a new project using TypeScript directly instead of old good Javascript. A lot of frameworks offer TypeScript support out-of-the-box (for example Next.js and create-react-app, our starting point for our UI library).

Getting started

In order to isolate basic components on the new UI, we started to write some code. Storybook allows us to write code and preview it immediately with no need to hard-refresh pages. After we define props and their types by discussing the interface of a new component, writing basic elements is a piece of cake.

With additional Storybook packages, addon-knobs and addon-docs, we can test various cases while developing.

addon-knobs helps us to directly test components by changing its props values on the fly. For example, loading our palette colors directly from the Enum definition and viewing live versions or toggling a boolean value by simply checking on a checkbox provided.

addon-docs builds documentation files for component’s props ,and you can integrate different previews based on prop combinations using markdown syntax inside JSX.

Our current UI library

We now have around 30 components that are used in various pages on our website and in some other non-public projects. By using them, we write less code, and, most important of all, we maintain a common UI. With exported Enums, we have to follow the previously defined rules. Our projects’ styled files start to become only div wrappers for our components and reusing them will be more and more usual. Little by little when refactoring old code, we tend to rewrite that part with Bonsai.

What’s next?

Our goal is to make our source repository public on Github. At the moment, our code is on Bitbucket company account and we published a new version on npm by merging pull requests to master branch using a semantic-release package for versioning and a Jenkins pipeline which doing the dirty job.

On npm the repository is public so if you want to try in your React project you are free to do yarn add @cloudacademy/bonsai following the documentation on our public storybook.

We are continuing to add components and refactor old ones where it is necessary to cover future requirements. We have in plan to create a simple and reusable layout grid (we still rely on writing basic flex components every time in our projects), basic placeholder elements (single shapes like rounds, rectangles, and similar ones when fetching external data), and extending current ones for accepting also external resource, but we have a long list of improvements scheduled!

A big thanks to Giacomo Sortino, Luca Faverio, Fabio Besana, Matteo Franceschi De Marchi, Lucio Bordonaro, Giacomo Consonni and Horia Veselin for their time and work to make Bonsai, finally, a reality.

The post Why Another UI Library? appeared first on Cloud Academy.

If you want to jumpstart your learning and dive right into our playbook, all you need to do is sign up for a 7-day free trial. You’ll get unlimited access to our learning paths, courses, certification prep exams, and our most popular hands-on labs, lab challenges, and lab playgrounds.

In this article, we’ll cover the following seven plays:

1. Get prepared and stay on track
2. Find a cloud certification learning path
3. Get certified to keep cloud infrastructure safe and secure
4. Learn the top 10 skills to land a job
5. Get the real-world experience you need
6. Push your skills to the next level
7. Take some risks in a live cloud environment

Play 1: Get prepared and stay on track

Welcome to Day 1 of our Tech Skills Training Camp! Today’s play from our Tech Skills Playbook is focused on getting prepared and staying on track. Starting something new is hard, but once you get into a routine, it will be so much easier to stay motivated to hit your end goal. After a few weeks of your new routine, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how it becomes second nature.

Set yourself up for success

1. Install the mobile app: Our app makes it easy for you to download Cloud Academy courses to learn while you’re offline. You can also use the app to cast your training directly to your TV using both iOS and Android. It’s simple. Just go the app, click the cast icon, and sit back and relax.
2. Set a goal: You only have free access for 7 days, so we want you to make the most of it. Determine how many hours you can dedicate each day, and then stick to it.
3. Schedule training reminders: We recently added training reminders into our platform to help keep you accountable. Simply go to your dashboard > click “Add training reminder” and boom — your time is booked.
4. Find a learning path: Our learning paths are guided learning experiences that provide step-by-step training to build your technical knowledge and hands-on skills.

What are learning paths?

Learning paths are objective-driven and comprised of:

• Courses: participate in video-based training to build your tech skills on industry-leading technologies
• Exams and quizzes: take assessments to help you retain what you learned
• Hands-on labs: learn step-by-step using actual accounts on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
• Lab challenges: troubleshoot complex scenarios without guidance using live environments
• Lab playgrounds: explore and test your own ideas in sandboxed environments — without installing any software

We build the learning framework. Now you just need to log on, watch the courses, practice your skills with our live labs, and watch your tech skills catapult to the next level.

Play 2: Find a cloud certification learning path

Getting certified shows that you have some of the most in-demand (and profitable) skills as validated by one of the most recognizable entities in cloud computing. According to an AWS Salary Survey Report, 47% of those certified experienced a salary increase after earning a certification, and there’s no better time to get certified than right now.

The best preparation for certification exams is practical experience. Our certification training mixes video-based courses with quizzes, certification prep exams, and practical labs, so you’ll gain valuable experience using actual accounts on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Explore our cloud certification learning paths

AWS

Foundational

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Associate

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect
• AWS Certified Developer
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator

Professional

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer

Azure

Fundamental

• AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Associate

• AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator (replaces AZ-103)
• AZ-204: Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate (replaces AZ-203)
• AZ-500: Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate
• DP-200: Microsoft Certified Azure Data Engineer Associate 
• DP-201: Microsoft Certified Azure Data Engineer Associate
• AI-100: Microsoft Certified Azure AI Engineer Associate

Professional

• AZ-300: Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect – Technologies
• AZ-301: Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect – Design
• AZ-400: Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions

Google Cloud Platform

Associate

• Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer 

Professional

• Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect
• Google Certified Professional Data Engineer
• Google Certified Professional Cloud Network Engineer
• Google Certified Professional Cloud Security Engineer 
• Google Certified Professional Cloud Developer

Play 3: Get certified to keep cloud infrastructure safe and secure

Now that the cloud is the new “norm,” today’s play is focused on certifications that help keep the cloud infrastructure safe and secure: Security and DevOps.

If you’ve already found a learning path that’s right for you, well done! Feel free to dive right into our dashboard to continue studying. If you’re still searching, then continue along our certification learning path journey. Finding a certification — and career path — that interests you is essential. When you’re interested in the material, you are more likely to stay engaged and maintain your motivation to earn the coveted certification.

Did you know…

The cost of a data breach has risen 12% over the past 5 years and now costs $3.92 million on average, according to a report from IBM Security. This increase is causing highly skilled security professionals to be in high demand. >>Read more.

The perception of DevOps and its role in the IT industry has changed over the last five years. Even though many believe that DevOps teams move too fast to handle security concerns, DevOps practices done right increase system security in the same way that continuous delivery increases stability. >>Read more.

Explore our security and DevOps learning paths

Security Certifications

• AWS Certified Security
• Foundation Certificate in Cyber Security
• Preparation for the (ISC)² CISSP Certification
• AZ-500: Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate

DevOps Certifications

• DevOps Engineer – Professional Certification Preparation for AWS
• AZ-400: Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam Preparation
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Exam Preparation
• DevOps Foundations – DevOps Institute Certification Exam Preparation
• Linux Server Professional

Explore other certifications

Still haven’t found a certification learning path that’s right for you? Feel free to explore all of our certifications or explore our Training Library.

Play 4: Learn the top 10 skills to land a job

Today’s play focuses on the top 10 skills to land a job. This list might surprise you, but according to CIO.com, programming languages make up 8 of the 10 top technical skills to get hired in 2020 — yes, 8 of the top 10! Here is the top 10 list in order:

1. SQL
2. Java
3. Python
4. Linux
5. Javascript
6. AWS
7. C++
8. C
9. C#
10. .NET

Want to know what’s great about this list? Cloud Academy offers learning paths, courses, and labs on 9 of 10 top skills — and you still have plenty of time to explore our extensive Training Library!

Explore our programming learning paths

Python

• Python for Beginners
• Introduction to Python
• Pythonic Programming

Java

• Introduction to Java
• Advanced Java Programming

SQL, .NET, and Javascript

• Learn SQL – From Newbie to Ninja
• Refactoring a Monolithic .Net Application to Use Cloud Services
• Web Development Fundamentals – Javascript Primer

Other programming languages

• Application and Service Development with ReactJS
• Fundamentals of R
• Learning Git First-Hand

Play 5: Get the real-world experience you need

Today’s play is focused on getting you real hands-on experience by firing up a hands-on lab. Our labs are not “simulated” experiences — they are real cloud environments using actual accounts on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Kubernetes, and much more. We have three very different types of labs: hands-on labs (guided), lab challenges (non-guided), and lab playgrounds (sandbox). Today we’re focusing on hands-on labs.

What are hands-on labs?

Hands-on labs are guided experiences to learn in live cloud environments with step-by-step guidance to practice your skills without getting stuck.

• Build hands-on experience using real accounts
• Solidify practical knowledge in a short amount of time
• Facilitate knowledge retention and enable experimentation

The post Tech Skills Playbook appeared first on Cloud Academy.