Here is a list of common tasks you typically do when building a web application. This list is useful if you want to master web development (the better you are at more of these things, the more well-rounded you’ll be as a web developer). It can also be useful to compare how different web frameworks (e.g., Laravel, Ruby on Rails, ASP.net, Spring MVC, Django, etc) handle these things.

• Routing requests to code.
• Running middleware to deal with requests (e.g., authentication, rate limiting, logging, A/B testing).
• Rendering HTML using a templating language (e.g., Laravel Blade, Twig, C#’s Razor, Nunjucks)
• Validating incoming HTTP requests.
• Handling errors (e.g., setting up an error monitoring tool like Sentry so you’re notified of errors).
• Bundling front-end assets (CSS & JavaScript).
• Caching requests.
• Dispatching events when things happen & registering event listeners to handle those events.
• Storing files on the server or a cloud provider.
• Sending emails.
• Deferring tasks with queues.
• Rate limiting.
• Scheduling tasks
• Registering users
• Logging in users.
• Authentication & Authorization
• Encrypting data.
• Querying & manipulating data from a database.
• Managing database changes with migrations.
• Using an ORM to make it easier to work with the database.
• Testing
  • Unit testing
  • Integration testing
  • End-to-end testing
• Protecting against common security vulnerabilities
  • CSRF
  • XSS
  • SQL injection
  • DDoS
• Deploying a web application
  • Setting up the server.
  • Setting up continuous delivery.
• Creating UI components to make UI code reusable.