Before we begin this course, let's spend a few minutes to discuss some preparation work that will help speed things along. Here is the playlist that you'll want to go through so that you can understand nodejs more easily. <a href='https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0dzCUj1L5JHV0pF04MmtgdALjhR70Lzj'>Fullstack MyJournal</a> Moreover, I'd like to set some expectations for this course since we'll be covering a lot of material. There's obviously a ton more that can be said about custom backends, but I want to keep our focus on a couple of key points. Namely, we want to make sure that these features are supported: <ul> <li>User authentication</li> <li>Object persistence in desired database</li> <li>File persistence through tools like AWS S3</li> <li>User Feed generation</li> </ul> There will be extras at the end of the course but let's make sure to wrap up these features before then.