#Backend
— 30 posts
Blockchain from Scratch: A Technical Intro with a Toy App You Can Actually Run
A ground-up, technical introduction to blockchains — hashes, blocks, Merkle trees, proof-of-work, consensus — paired with a ~200-line TypeScript toy chain you can run, fork, and break. The version of the explanation that assumes you're a developer, not an investor.
Kafka for Beginners: What It Is, When to Use It, and Producer/Consumer Examples in Java, Python, Node.js, and Go
A ground-up introduction to Apache Kafka — what it actually is, the handful of features that matter, the use cases it's genuinely good at, and working producer/consumer snippets in four languages so you can run your first topic in under ten minutes.
Redis for Beginners: What It Is, When to Use It, and Client Examples in Java, Python, Node.js, and Go
A ground-up introduction to Redis — what it actually is, the handful of data structures that matter, the use cases it's genuinely good at, and working client snippets in four languages so you can run your first cache, queue, and pub/sub in under ten minutes.
Observability with OpenTelemetry: A Practical End-to-End Guide
Instrumenting a production Node.js service for traces, metrics, and logs with OpenTelemetry — plus correlation by trace ID, exporter choices, and what breaks in production.
Zero-Downtime Database Migrations: The Expand/Contract Playbook
How to change a production schema without taking traffic down — expand/contract, backfills, dual-writes, online DDL, and the migrations that always bite you.
Caching Strategies Beyond 'Just Add Redis'
Cache-aside, write-through, write-behind, read-replicas, edge caches, HTTP ETags, and stale-while-revalidate — how to pick the right caching pattern and how to invalidate without tears.
CQRS and Event Sourcing: The Real Trade-offs
When CQRS pays off, when Event Sourcing makes it worse, and when plain CRUD is the right call. With TypeScript examples and the anti-patterns to avoid.
Backpressure and Flow Control in Async Systems
When a producer outpaces its consumer — Node streams, Go channels, Rust async, RxJS, and Kafka consumer lag. The patterns that actually keep memory in check.
PostgreSQL Internals: MVCC, VACUUM, and HOT Updates
How Postgres actually stores rows — tuples, xmin/xmax, HOT updates, table bloat, and why VACUUM is the most misunderstood command in your database.
Designing RESTful API Endpoints: Best Practices for HTTP Methods and URL Structure
A comprehensive guide to RESTful API endpoint design — covering HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE), URL structure, status codes, pagination patterns, error handling with RFC 7807, and real-world implementations in TypeScript, Java, Python, and C#.
WebSocket and SSE Communication : Server-to-Server Communication Technologies
A comprehensive guide to WebSocket and Server-Sent Events for real-time communication — covering the WebSocket protocol, SSE, scaling persistent connections, heartbeats, reconnection, and production patterns.
GraphQL Federation : Server-to-Server Communication Technologies
A comprehensive guide to GraphQL Federation for server-to-server communication — covering schema composition, subgraph design, entity resolution, the gateway router, performance optimization, and production deployment.
Event Streaming with Kafka : Server-to-Server Communication Technologies
A comprehensive guide to event streaming with Apache Kafka — covering topics, partitions, consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, and production deployment patterns.
Message Queue Communication : Server-to-Server Communication Technologies
A comprehensive guide to message queues for server-to-server communication — covering RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, delivery guarantees, dead-letter queues, backpressure, and production patterns.
gRPC Communication : Server-to-Server Communication Technologies
A comprehensive guide to gRPC for server-to-server communication — covering Protocol Buffers, service definitions, streaming patterns, interceptors, error handling, load balancing, and production deployment.
REST API Communication : Server-to-Server Communication Technologies
A comprehensive guide to REST API for server-to-server communication — covering API design principles, HTTP semantics, authentication patterns, error handling, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and production best practices.
Server-to-Server Communication Technologies
A high-level comparison of server-to-server communication patterns — REST, gRPC, Message Queues, Event Streaming, GraphQL Federation, and WebSocket/SSE — covering when to use each, trade-offs, and real-world use cases.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) : Authentication Strategies for Modern Web Applications
A comprehensive implementation guide to multi-factor authentication — covering TOTP setup, backup codes, SMS verification, hardware security keys, adaptive MFA, and recovery strategies.
Passwordless Authentication : Authentication Strategies for Modern Web Applications
A comprehensive implementation guide to passwordless authentication — covering magic email links, SMS OTP, WebAuthn/FIDO2 passkeys, implementation patterns, and security considerations.
OAuth 2.0 Authentication : Authentication Strategies for Modern Web Applications
A comprehensive implementation guide to OAuth 2.0 — covering authorization flows, OpenID Connect, implementing Google and GitHub login, token management, and enterprise SSO patterns.
JWT Authentication : Authentication Strategies for Modern Web Applications
A comprehensive implementation guide to JWT authentication — covering token structure, signing algorithms, access/refresh token patterns, middleware implementation, token revocation strategies, and security best practices.
Session-Based Authentication : Authentication Strategies for Modern Web Applications
A comprehensive implementation guide to session-based authentication — covering how sessions work under the hood, server-side storage strategies, cookie security, scaling with Redis, and production best practices.
Authentication Strategies for Modern Web Applications
A high-level comparison of modern authentication approaches — Session-based, JWT, OAuth 2.0, Passwordless, and MFA — covering when to use each, trade-offs, and real-world use cases.
Building a Production Monitoring and Observability Stack
Monitoring tells you something is broken. Observability tells you why. Here's the stack and methodology I use to instrument production systems — from metrics and logs to traces and alerting that doesn't wake you up at 3 AM for nothing.
System Design Patterns Every Senior Engineer Should Know
Essential system design patterns for senior engineers, covering load balancing, caching strategies, database sharding, message queues, rate limiting, circuit breaker, CQRS, and event sourcing with practical architectural examples.
TypeScript Patterns for Large Codebases
TypeScript at scale requires different patterns than TypeScript for a side project. Here are the type patterns and architectural decisions that keep large codebases maintainable, based on managing 200K+ line TypeScript projects.
PostgreSQL Performance Tuning: Lessons from Production
After optimizing PostgreSQL for three high-traffic production systems, I've compiled the tuning strategies that actually moved the needle — from indexing patterns to connection pooling and query optimization.
Why Rust Changed How I Think About Backend Performance
After shipping a 50k RPS service in Rust, I returned to Node.js with a completely different mental model for performance. This is the story of memory models, threading, and why your async runtime is both better and worse than you think.
API Design: REST Best Practices from Real-World Experience
Designing APIs that developers actually enjoy using requires more than following REST conventions. After building and consuming dozens of APIs, here are the principles that matter most — from URL design to pagination, versioning, and error handling.
Deploying Machine Learning Models to Production with FastAPI
Training an ML model is the easy part. Serving it reliably in production — with proper input validation, versioning, monitoring, and scaling — is where the real engineering happens. Here's a battle-tested approach using FastAPI.