Typically, “design” brings to mind front-end developers and visual aesthetics. A beautiful website or a visually appealing user interface is often the painted picture.
Unintuitively, backend developers are also integral designers, focusing on system design, architecture, dependencies, and data structures – elements that make up the invisible framework that supports and improves the overall user experience.
Backend developers craft the architectural blueprint of an application, so that it meets performance, scalability, and maintainability requirements. This typically involves selecting appropriate technologies, defining data structures, and establishing relationships between many different system components.
Each decision impacts how users interact with the application, influencing factors like loading times, data retrieval speeds, and overall reliability.
Uniting developers and designers
The internet is filled with memes of “dev vs designer,” poking fun at the humorous and sometimes contentious relationship between these two roles. Despite the stereotypes, collaboration between developers and designers can yield spectacular results.
The term “designer” often refers to roles focused on interface design, such as Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, and Product Designer. Collaboration between these designers and backend engineers is key for creating a cohesive and smooth user experience.
Developers and designers bring unique perspectives and expertise to the table.
While designers prioritize aesthetics and user interaction, developers focus on functionality, performance, and scalability. Effective collaboration makes sure that the final product is visually appealing, robust and efficient.
For instance, a designer may envision a sleek, interactive interface, but without the backend infrastructure to support it, the user experience could suffer. Working together, developers and designers can create a product that balances form and function, engaging users while maintaining high performance.
How backend engineers make key design decisions
Design involves making informed decisions about appearance, function, and operation to meet specific objectives. Backend software engineers are key in this process, contributing to product design with their technical expertise and insights.
For example, choosing a microservices architecture over a monolithic structure can improve scalability and flexibility. Similarly, selecting the right database technology can improve data retrieval times and ensure data integrity.
Each decision is guided by the need to create a system that is functional and easy to maintain and expand. Backend engineers must consider current requirements while anticipating future needs, so that their design choices support long-term growth and adaptability.
Why pragmatism is key to successful design
Design has two sides: aesthetics/creativity and pragmatism. Both are key for delivering a product that meets user expectations and requirements. Pragmatism focuses on performance, scalability, and maintainability, so that the system functions reliably and efficiently.
Backend engineers’ design choices greatly impact these aspects, shaping the overall quality of the application.
For instance, the decision to implement caching mechanisms can drastically reduce load times and improve user experience. Designing a system with modular components can simplify maintenance and facilitate future upgrades – ultimately keeping applications robust and scalable, capable of handling increased loads and evolving user needs.
Backend engineers must balance the immediate requirements of the project with the long-term goals of the organization. Their decisions influence the technical performance of the application along with its usability and maintainability. Prioritizing pragmatism, they help create systems that are efficient, reliable, and capable of supporting the organization’s growth and innovation efforts.
5 impactful design choices made by backend engineers
Backend engineers make key design decisions that heavily influence the overall performance, scalability, and user experience of an application. Decisions made here are fundamental to the system’s infrastructure and include defining system architecture, adding new microservices, integrating new SaaS providers, changing APIs, and editing data structures.
1. Defining system architecture
System architecture is the blueprint for how different components of an application interact with each other. Engineers must decide between monolithic and microservices architectures. While monolithic architectures might simplify initial development, microservices architectures provide greater scalability and flexibility, making them suitable for complex, evolving applications. For instance, companies like Netflix and Amazon have adopted microservices to handle massive amounts of data and user requests.
2. Adding new microservices
Microservices are individual services designed to perform specific functions within an application. Modularity allows for independent development, testing, and deployment, reducing the risk of system-wide failures. Adding new microservices can streamline development processes and improve application resilience.
A survey by O’Reilly found that 61% of organizations using microservices reported increased deployment speed and reduced downtime.
3. Integrating new SaaS providers
Software as a Service (SaaS) providers offer cloud-based solutions that can be integrated into an application to add functionality without building it from scratch. Integration can reduce development time and costs while providing robust, scalable services. For example, using services like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure can support and improve data storage, machine learning, and analytics capabilities.
4. Changing APIs
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow different software systems to communicate with each other. Modifying APIs can enhance system interoperability, facilitate third-party integrations, and improve overall functionality. That being said, these changes require careful planning to maintain compatibility and prevent disruptions. Expert API management makes sure that new versions are backward compatible, minimizing the impact on existing integrations.
5. Editing data structures
Data structures define how data is stored, accessed, and managed within an application. Optimizing data structures can lead to faster query responses and more efficient data processing. Engineers must choose appropriate data models (e.g., relational vs. NoSQL databases) based on the application’s requirements.
For instance, NoSQL databases like MongoDB are ideal for handling large volumes of unstructured data, while relational databases like MySQL offer comprehensive transaction management and consistency.
Shaping user experiences through backend design
Backend design decisions are decisive for an application’s performance and reliability. These decisions, though often invisible to users, greatly affect how users interact with the application.
Factors such as loading times, data search speeds, and the seamlessness of the user experience across different locations rely heavily on the backend design.
- Loading times: A well-designed backend can greatly reduce loading times, boosting user satisfaction. Studies show that a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. Optimizing server responses, using caching strategies, and efficient database queries helps backend engineers create faster, more responsive applications.
- Data search speed: Optimizing indexing, using in-memory databases like Redis, and implementing search engines like Elasticsearch can improve data search speeds. Faster data access enhances user experience, especially in data-intensive applications such as eCommerce platforms and social media.
- Seamless user experience: An expertly designed backend makes sure that users have a consistent experience, regardless of their location. Implementing content delivery networks (CDNs) and optimizing network configurations can reduce latency and provide faster access to content globally – which is key for applications with a global user base
Creative and problem-solving skills of backend engineers
Backend engineers embody creativity, intuition, adaptability, and problem-solving skills. They manage the complexities of these technologies, selecting design methods that align with evolving requirements. Creativity here is a must for addressing the unique challenges posed by modern software development.
Historically, programming required writing code from scratch, but today’s engineers often use components, libraries, and frameworks to build sophisticated systems, along with growing usage of AI coding assistants. Assembly-like approaches like these require a deep understanding of how different parts fit together, requiring both technical expertise and creative thinking. To illustrate this with an example, choosing the right combination of open-source libraries can drastically reduce development time and maximize system reliability.
Adapting backend design to new tech and business needs
Backend engineers must continually adapt to new software architectures and programming paradigms to stay relevant. Shifts toward distributed systems and cloud-native applications exemplifies this need for this adaptation. Embracing these technologies can boost system scalability, reliability, and flexibility.
- Distributed systems: Distributed systems involve multiple interconnected components that work together to achieve a common goal, ultimately improving fault tolerance and scalability. Engineers must design systems that manage data consistency, handle network partitions, and ensure high availability. The rise of microservices and serverless computing reinforces this shift toward more dynamic and resilient architectures.
- Cloud-native applications: Cloud-native applications leverage cloud computing services to build scalable and resilient applications, such as through using containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. Deploying applications in the cloud, organizations can achieve greater flexibility and reduce operational overhead.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, over 85% of organizations will have adopted a cloud-first principle.
Backend engineers also need to craft designs that can evolve over time due to changing product requirements. Succession design and evolutionary architecture allow systems to adapt to new demands without significant rework.
Logical and functional design in engineering
Engineers often perform logical and functional design implicitly, breaking down complex problems into manageable components – which then becomes explicit through system design principles, providing a strategic advantage in software development.
Fully adopting and embracing system design requires identifying high-cohesion areas within the codebase, wherein related functionalities are grouped together, avoiding high-coupling dependencies, in which changes in one part of the system adversely affect others.
Strategic design reduces technical debt, which refers to the long-term costs of choosing an easy solution now instead of a better approach that would take longer.
Technical debt can lead to increased maintenance costs and reduced system performance over time. For example, modular design principles promote low coupling and high cohesion, making the system easier to understand, test, and maintain. A well-designed system architecture supports scalability and adaptability, allowing for easier integration of new features and technologies.
Recognizing and applying these implicit design practices, engineers can create robust, maintainable, and scalable systems that support long-term business goals. Careful attention must be paid to logical and functional design to ultimately improve the current system and better position the organization for future success.
