What project could I build to learn a backend language (nodejs in my case)? Any cool ideas? 😊

I can suggest to make discord bot, you are using in that case discord.js which is some kind of framework but in reality it just helps you interact with the discord official API.

I made a few bots and learned a lot about node.js and in particular phantomjs (headless chrome), d3js, jsdom, express and so on.

Among the bots i builded, there is functional bots for moderation purpose, inside jokes for some servers, an emoji bot to share emoji accross every server, a games bot to play chess, power 4, checkers, solitary and much more, a simple voice recognition bots to familiarize myself with external call to other api (in that case wit.ai), a music bot to know how audio flux need to be handled and compressd...

Ofc its one way to learn node.js but as the community give great support for discord.js it can help a lot in some case. I will not say that i know everything about node but for sure i used most of the popular modules.

Find something you'd like to have, and try to build it. That way, you have the point of view of an user and a developer. Best way to learn how to do things right, in my opinion.

In my opinion go for php laravel or nodejs to build a powerful api in which it reads from database and post them as get or post as a first step. Then you can grow don't push yourself so hard from the beginning you will hate it trust me.

I agree with @TheOct0 .... You'll learn alot more because 1. You need it so there's a greater chance of you seeing it through to completion & 2. Since you need it, you're going to put your heart and soul into it

@Holyfield3000 very wise words my friend, well but he is asking how to begin and how to take the initiative to launch using which technologies because there are many but it's really hard to know how. Because trust me i faced the same issue

A place where Node really shines is with the creation of RESTful APIs.

Going through the steps required to properly set up and configure a Node Express backend is(imho) an art in itself since there are so many ways to go about it.

Once you set up a basic rest api(create a library managig system or a chat application with web sockets or something like a small cms) you can test the waters with a front end ONLY after you get the backend done right!

For frontend I suggest: first JQuery....i know i know, love it or hate it it really is good to know, this is comming from first hand experience...enterprise experience.. you never know if you can use anything other than jquery, so i suggest learning it good enough to survive.

Then something like React, which is complex to use right, but enlightening in terms of functional programming.

Then Vue, more of a reactive style in code, simple and beautiful.

Finally Angular 6. There is something to learn from Typescript

@AleCx04 continuation

And Angular 6 exposes people to dependency injection and really solid oop constructs that make front end code very expandable and solid.

This is all under the assumption that you know Javascript relatively well.

As @TheOct0 said, go for something you feel that you need. If you happen to know any frontend framework, build a REST API. Node is great for that shit

I think I'll go for something image-board like. Maybe I'll implement deep learning later on to select displayed content based on the user with something like deeplearn.js :)

@TheOct0 playing the dual role is really the best way I have found when developing something to my liking