So, I've been getting in the mix more lately with other developers on Twitter, and something several of us noticed is there's a lot of focus on front end development and frameworks and hardly any on the backend. Yes, it's all of a piece, and you have to have both to have a successful app people want to use, but I think it's time we take a look at what it's like to develop on the backend.

It can seem daunting and mystifying, since there can be an alphabet soup of issues, protocols and frameworks to deal with, and not obvious way to interact with them as you develop. What I am hoping to do is develop a sample project and reveal tools and methods to show it's not as bad as you think. Hopefully this will help people ease their way into being a full stack developer, or dare I say it, a backend specialist. Trust me, there is serious demand for people who can rapidly develop reliable and scalable backend code.

Our sample project will use Python for simplicity's sake, plus, you can develop serious backends in Python. We'll kick off with environments and tooling, and what it's like to go from install to development cycles on your own box.

More to come.