As far as 1 and 2 go. I did write my final year uni project in C, but that was around 96-7. It was a cgi-bin program that processed a html form, queried and ingres database and output html. Since then the nearest I done to compiled C is a couple of years with C# back in 2003-4, some of which was for compiled windows programs. Mostly it was asp.net. Since 2005 I worked with PHP. I actually did a lot of interfacing php with third party APIs, many of which used JSON. I am not yet familiar with nodejs, although it has been on my radar...