Track · 12 courses

Backend engineer

Build and run the server side of a product: HTTP, APIs, databases, auth, caching, queues, and what changes when one server is not enough.

Who it’s for: Developers who can already write code and want to own the backend of a real product.

The courses, in order

3 of 12 live

01
Live33 lessons~14 hours
Go Foundations
One backend language end to end: types, errors, concurrency, tests and an HTTP service.
02
Coming soon
How the Web Works
Follow one request from a URL to a response: DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP and the proxies in between.
1Vote
03
Coming soon
API Design That Ages Well
Resources, errors, pagination, idempotency keys and versioning, on one API that keeps growing.
Read alongside
- On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules17 min
1Vote
04
Coming soon
Postgres for Application Developers
Model the data, write the queries, then read a query plan and add the index that fixes it.
Read alongside
- A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks16 min
- The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree)19 min
1Vote
05
Coming soon
Transactions and Isolation
What a transaction promises, the anomalies each isolation level allows, and how to stop lost updates.
1Vote
06
Coming soon
Design an Auth System
Passwords, sessions, cookies, magic links and OAuth, and the attack each piece stops.
1Vote
07
Coming soon
Design a Cache
Put a cache in front of a slow database, then handle invalidation, stampedes and eviction.
Read alongside
- Space/Time Trade-offs in Hash Coding with Allowable Errors16 min
0Vote
08
Live9 lessons~3.3 hours
Design a Message Queue
Move slow work off the request path, and learn what at-least-once delivery means for your handlers.
09
Coming soon
Logs, Metrics and Traces
Instrument one service so you can say what broke, where, and since when, without guessing.
Read alongside
- Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure23 min
- The Tail at Scale20 min
0Vote
10
Coming soon
How a Program Runs
What the CPU and kernel do with your binary: syscalls, interrupts, scheduling, virtual memory, fork and exec.
Read alongside
- The UNIX Time-Sharing System19 min
0Vote
11
Coming soon
How Containers Work
Images, layers, namespaces and cgroups, then one service shipped as a container.
1Vote
12
Live25 lessons5 hours
Distributed Systems in a Day
What changes when one server is not enough: replication, partitions, consensus and failure.