I think this answer kind of puts the cart before the horse. I've been doing backend dev for many years and my perspective is that it's better to dive in and le

I think this answer kind of puts the cart before the horse. I've been doing backend dev for many years and my perspective is that it's better to dive in and learn things as you go along. Yes, all of these pieces listed above are important, BUT if you focus on learning each one well, it'll be a long time before you actually ship backend code. You don't need to understand things like containers, deployment, queues, distributed systems, etc to just start. I'm going to take an opposite approach and say that the best way to get started in backend is from the top of the stack. Build a simple web app or API, for example a journal or bookmarking service. Language and framework choice don't really matter at this point. Fundamentals are not radically different across them aside from the biggest difference being asynchronous vs synchronous paradigms. Start simple.