Backend Engineering
How requests travel, API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), SQL vs NoSQL, indexing, caching with Redis, queues, authentication, scaling, Docker and backend languages.
12 lessons · about 1 hours
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- 01How a Web Request Works Follow one click from the browser to the server and back, through DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP, load balancers, your code and the database.
- 02REST API Design Design APIs that are predictable and pleasant to use: resource naming, methods, status codes, pagination, versioning, errors and idempotency.
- 03REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC Three popular ways for services to talk. See how each works, compare them side by side, and learn which to pick for public APIs, mobile apps and internal microservices.
- 04SQL vs NoSQL Databases Relational tables or flexible documents? Understand how each stores data, the four NoSQL families, ACID vs BASE, and a simple way to choose.
- 05Database Indexing & Transactions Why some queries take 2 ms and others 20 seconds. Learn how B-tree indexes work, how to read a query plan, and how isolation levels prevent concurrency bugs.
- 06Caching & Redis Keep frequently used data close and fast. Learn caching strategies, invalidation, eviction policies, the classic pitfalls, and what Redis can do beyond caching.
- 07Message Queues & RabbitMQ Queues let services hand off work without waiting. Learn producers, consumers, acknowledgements, exchanges, retries and dead-letter queues with RabbitMQ.
- 08Authentication, Authorization & API Security Who are you and what are you allowed to do? Sessions vs JWT, OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, password storage, and the OWASP risks every backend developer must know.
- 09Scaling, Load Balancing & Rate Limiting How to serve 10 users, then 10 million. Vertical vs horizontal scaling, load balancers, stateless servers, replication, sharding, rate limiting and resilience basics.
- 10Docker & Containers Package your app with everything it needs so it runs the same everywhere. Images, containers, Dockerfiles, layers, volumes, networks and Docker Compose, step by step.
- 11Observability: Logs, Metrics & Traces When production breaks at 3 a.m., observability tells you what, where and why. Learn the three pillars, the golden signals, SLOs and OpenTelemetry.
- 12Backend Languages: Node.js, Go, Python & Rust A friendly tour of the four backend languages in your notes. How each handles concurrency, what it's best at, and the same tiny API written in all four.