Backend Best Practices: The Tricks That Keep a Service Boring
Boring is the highest compliment a backend can earn. The layering, config, jobs, and observability habits that stop the phone call at three in the morning.
Building Backends08
Subject · 8 posts
backend
gRPC: How Services Talk When the Client Is Another Server
REST is built for the browser. When both ends are your own servers, a typed binary contract with generated code is often faster and safer. That is gRPC.
Building Backends07
Real-Time: Polling, WebSocket, WebRTC, and What Is on the Wire
HTTP is a client asking and a server answering. Real-time is the server needing to speak first. Here is the ladder of ways to do that, and what to pick when.
Building Backends06
Designing a REST API That Ages Well
An API is a contract you have to keep. Resources and verbs, the status codes that matter, idempotency, pagination, versioning, and errors that a client can act on.
Building Backends05
SQL or NoSQL: Just Use Postgres, and the Cases Where You Should Not
NoSQL was sold as the future and is really a specialised tool. What each kind buys, why relational is the right default, and the real cases for reaching past it.
Building Backends04
Databases and ACID: What a Transaction Actually Promises
A transaction is a promise the database makes when two things happen at once. What ACID guarantees, the anomalies it prevents, and the race it does not.
Building Backends03
Django or FastAPI: How the Framework Shapes the Code You Write
One gives you everything and an opinion; the other gives you speed and a blank page. The choice is about how much you want the framework to decide for you.
Building Backends02
Design Patterns You Actually Use, and the Ones You Should Not Reach For
The pattern books list twenty-three. You reach for about six. Here are those six, the problem each solves, and why naming a pattern is a tool, not a trophy.
Building Backends01