Marketing co-founder trying to understand development!

Hey Haroon,

I've co-founded successful startups as CTO and am always happy when people try to look over the edge. Let me try sharing some (simplified) basics with you and maybe you have some specific questions from there :)

• tech stack: the programming languages and frameworks you use to develop your application
• framework: code written by the open source community that simplifies common tasks, so you don't have to re-invent the wheel every time. common choices: ruby on rails, django, laravel or nextjs
• conventions: each of the frameworks or communities around those follow common conventions that make code bases of other teams easier to understand and allow you to focus on the code specific to your product
• business logic: code specific to your product. for example it's common that you have a title field in many applications, but it might be specific to your application that you send out an email when a certain title field changes
• backend: things that are not immediately visible to the user, e.g. storing something to a database, sending out an email or push notification, creating the content for a feed
• api: a data interface to interact with the backend, e.g. you can retrieve information in a computer readable format or instruct the backend to perform a certain action
• frontend: the interface that is visible to the end user
• infrastructure: the computers running the backend code
• libraries: smaller building blocks developed by the open source community that you can use in your project

Hope this helps a bit!

Cheers,
T

let me see if i can explain, let me know when you are not able to understand and i will try to simplify further.
So lets start with what you do know

1. Website: you do know what a website is right? you are reading this comment on indiehackers.com which is a website how do you interact with it? you can type indiehackers.com in your browser and you should be able to see it. So what happens when you type it and hit enter? a request goes from your browser(client) to server which sends some data back and your browser interprests and displays that data.
2. Frontend: data that was sent to the browser to interpret and display is actually whole app in itself it containse data to display + additional logic to help you interact with this data. This app is called frontend.
3. Backend: when you sent the request to server there was an app that checked if you are unlogged user or logged user and based on that it sent you the data so your experience would be different based on whether you were logged or unlogged user. This app that runs on server is termed as backend.
4. API: Frontend needs to talk to backend in some standardized way so that they understand each other. This standard way of talking to each other is called application programming interface.
5. Framework: your browser can understand html which gives details about your document but not its layout, CSS which tells how that document needs to be laid out and javascript which adds interactivity to the document page that you are seeing.
   Now you can either stick to html+css+js or you can combine them together with some common utilities so that you don't have to write same functionality again and again this combination is called framework in this case it would be frontend framework some exmples are angular, vue, react etc.
6. Techstack: Similar to frontend , backend can also combine common functionality required for multiple sites and it would become backend framework for e.g. laravel, ruby on rails etc. This framework would run on some operating system like linux and it would also need some kind of database to manage the data for e.g. info about username and password. this framework+os+db+ server is called techstack for e.g. LAMP is linux+apache server+mysql database+ php(language/framework) or MERN.
7. Firebase is a backend service by google that makes it easy to develop frontend.

I have skipped some details to simplify things feel free to ask if you don't understand something or need further elaboration.

I strongly recommend taking some basic courses on teamtreehouse.com. I have been recommending them for many years.

Hey Haroon,
I am a software engineer turned entrepreneur. I struggle with marketing and sales, so I can relate to what you’re going through. The information previously shared by others is spot on so I won’t repost it. My advice is reach out to technical people on social media. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to help. Good luck!