Backend Development

Backend development is the server-side work behind an application: APIs, business logic, databases, queues and background jobs. Backend engineers pick languages such as Java, Python, Node.js or C#, decide how data is stored and how services talk to each other, and keep it all fast and correct under load. Most of the hard calls are trade-offs, such as SQL against NoSQL or a monolith against microservices.

178 articles

24/09/2023 10 min read

Annotations in Java: Built-in, Custom, and Retention Policies

Executive Summary: Java annotations are types declared with @interface whose elements hold compile-time constants. I cover built-ins like…
13/09/2023 15 min read

FastAPI Tutorial: Build a REST API in Python Step by Step

Build a complete task API with FastAPI: typed request and response models, a database session per request, proper…
05/09/2023 11 min read

Circuit Breaker Pattern: States, Failing Fast, and Bulkheads

The circuit breaker pattern: the three circuit breaker states, failing fast with real fallbacks, and the bulkhead pattern…
02/09/2023 12 min read

Practice: Process and Analyze a CSV with Streams

Executive Summary: This practice project analyzes a sales CSV with Java streams. You model rows as a validated…
12/08/2023 11 min read

NIO.2: Path, Files, and Modern File Handling

Executive Summary: NIO.2’s Path and Files replace string-built file paths and verbose IO code. I’ll cover building and…
09/08/2023 13 min read

Pydantic v2 Tutorial: Data Validation and Settings in Python

Validate untrusted data with typed models, write field and model validators, serialize with model_dump, and load typed settings…
08/07/2023 10 min read

File I/O in Java: Streams, Readers, and Writers

Executive Summary: Classic Java file I/O splits into byte streams for binary data and readers and writers for…
04/07/2023 12 min read

Service Discovery: Registry, Patterns, and Consul vs etcd

Service discovery: how the service registry tracks who is up, the client-side vs server-side discovery comparison, and the…
14/06/2023 12 min read

Pandas Tutorial for Beginners: DataFrames, Filtering, and GroupBy

Load a CSV into a DataFrame, clean it, filter rows, add columns, and summarize with groupby, using a…
28/05/2023 11 min read

Utility Classes: Objects, Math, Random, and UUID

Executive Summary: The JDK’s utility classes cover null-safe checks, exact math, random numbers, and IDs. I’ll walk through…
17/05/2023 15 min read

How Do LLMs Work? A Developer’s Guide to Tokens, Context, and Embeddings

An LLM predicts the next token, over and over. Learn tokens, context windows, temperature, and embeddings through small…
07/05/2023 11 min read

Date and Time API in Java (java.time)

Executive Summary: The java.time API separates human dates from machine timestamps. I’ll cover LocalDate and LocalDateTime for calendar…
02/05/2023 11 min read

Event Driven Architecture: Pub/Sub, Event Sourcing, and Choreography

Event driven architecture: the pub/sub vs message queue comparison, event sourcing as the system of record, and choreography…
19/04/2023 11 min read

Python Linting and Formatting: Ruff, Black, and flake8 Compared

Linters find bugs and formatters end style debates. Compare Ruff, Black, flake8, isort, and pylint, and copy a…