· intermediate
Backend Foundations
The parts of a backend that decide whether it survives contact with real traffic: an API contract worth depending on, work that is safe to retry, and the failure modes that turn one slow dependency into an outage.
Written in house, from the work rather than from a syllabus. Every example is one we would use ourselves, and every quiz question explains why its answer is right.
What you’ll learn
- Choose verbs and status codes that clients can actually act on
- Separate authentication from authorisation, and enforce each in the right place
- Make an operation safe to retry, including the ones that take money
- Cache without serving wrong data, and know what your TTL is really for
- Move work to a queue and handle the failures that creates
- Explain why a slow dependency is more dangerous than a dead one
Before you start
- · Comfort writing code in any language
- · Some exposure to HTTP and SQL