Wondering how to make Kotlin backend projects with no Android involved.

Hey all.

I’m a new programmer. JavaScript was my first programming language which I learned for the past 5 months. I really enjoyed it, and found pleasure in building backends with the MERN stack.

I want to learn how to build Kotlin projects without Android. The reason why I don’t want to learn Android development at the moment is because I was hoping to make a more vanilla thing with Kotlin, somewhat like how in JavaScript we can make API calls with fetch, or building an API with Express. Definitely not hating on Android! haha.

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So, I have a few questions relating to that:

• I was hoping to find some YouTube videos online on Kotlin projects but found very little that wasn’t Android based. Does anyone know if there are videos like this out there?
• I noticed that Kotlin is called “better Java”… Does that mean I need to get Java under my belt first to “get” Kotlin?
• What are some project ideas you all recommend that I can start doing as a beginner without the need for Android Studio?

Apologies if these are too broad of a question or was asked a million times.