As a visual learner, how should I become good at backend development.
I am struggling with this right now. I need to have a diagram in my mind. Bog data is challenging me nowadays a lot.

Any strategies from the experienced devs here?

There are some tools that may help you visualizing endpoints or databases when you develop backends:
- swagger
- dbdiagram
But backend is most of the times pure coding just hop in do mistakes and learn from it...

Everything is nested arrays.

Everything.

Maybe they call it a struct or dictionary or library or map or response or object or a hundred different names because they're all being fancy fucks.

But it's still nested arrays all the way down.

Of course each will have its nuances and syntax and indexing and key/value relationships and sorting algorithms and a hundred different things that make them unique... I'm just saying visually, in my head, literally all data is nested arrays.

Basically, it's neo from the matrix except everything is JSON.

I often visualize backend code as a tree of calls/dependencies.

It can help to draw a simple diagram with the major parts as circles and lines to indicate in which direction calls go.

Often be code is structured in layers, at the top you have the api or external interface. Under that you have business rules, then data access code and in the bottom any databases or calls to other systems like webservices or similar.

A lower layer never calls a higher unless its some message bus involved.

It's called class diagrams and it's art.

I'm afraid simple UML doesn't play any role anymore? IMO, that's a very powerful way of visualization code and every team should use it at least for interface specification.
BTW, This also works well for front-end code 😉

I personally like and recommend plantuml 👍