>imo learn ruby/rails. It's gonna be by far the easiest backend work to get into as a previously frontend only dev.
I agree. Rails saves you a lot of headache and you can get into details later on.
>Backend isn't quite something you "hop into".
I wouldn't agree here. I have yet to see the Rails dev that needs to code a turing machine, scheduler, hashing algorithm, or A* algorithm.
Especially in our modern framework world where there's an library for everything. You have to do really really crazy stuff to make something with rails (or any other big mature framework, that is) where you can't just import a library and are done.
The actual modern "backend working process" is about 80% doing research which library to use, googling how to configure stuff and using a little glue code to make the differnt peices interact. Only for the additional 20% you need to actually "hard code" things out. But even here you will probalbly read tutorials to similar topics and try your best to make it work.
>also, learning Angular or Ember or whatever is fine, but in 2 or 3 years when those frameworks are dead
Right now I think Vue might be worth investing time, since it's going up and super simple. If you add some Node (which is only JS) you're almost there.
>I think the part about JS frameworks becoming obsolete is what scares me most.
It never will. Never.
BTW you think way too much. Most companies are glad to find someone doing full-stack, so if you are great at Frontend/Design and JS..
Just learn Node.JS, it was basically made as entry for frontend guys like you.
The one big technology which is a must in Backend is databases. Just take a few days to weeks to really dig deep into SQL. It's always important, and if you know how to index properly, avoid the common SQL pitfalls and can explain the second normal form you will already outperform 80% of all web devs out there.
And learn some basics of MongoDB, it's easy and fun.
