Treehouse asked me to write up an overview of back end web development to publish on their YouTube channel. Yeah, there’s a little sales pitch at the end, but if you want to know what web developers do, it’s a great summary. Our motion graphics team’s work is amazing, as always!

I didn’t want to just throw a bunch of framework names at people and leave it to them to sort out, so I organized things roughly according to the steps a web app goes through to complete the HTTP request/response cycle. The browser’s request goes to the web server (I mention Apache or Nginx as possible servers), from there to the web app (Java offers Hibernate and Spring for this, Python offers Django and Flask, and so on), which communicates with the database (could be MySQL, SQL Server, etc.)… You get the idea. I’m hoping it will leave beginners with a scaffold to organize all these technology names they read about.