Articles

Tls 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Transport Layer Security, commonly abbreviated as TLS, is a cryptographic protocol that protects data transmitted over computer networks. It is the modern successor to SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer. Although people still often say “SSL certificate” or “SSL connection,” most modern secure web traffic ...

Secure Containers 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Containers package an application together with its dependencies, providing portability and reproducibility. That same packaging surface can, however, introduce security risks if images are built carelessly, runtimes are misconfigured, or containers run with unnecessary privileges. This document cov...

Security Vulnerabilities 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Backend systems form the foundation of web applications, APIs, and data-driven services. Because the backend often handles authentication, authorization, business logic, databases, payments, personal information, and integrations with other systems, security weaknesses in this layer can have serious...

Credentials Management 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Applications almost always need some form of secret. These secrets may include database passwords, API keys, TLS private keys, OAuth client secrets, webhook signing keys, encryption keys, and credentials for third-party services...

Auth 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Authentication is the process of verifying who a user is. Authorization is the process of deciding what that user is allowed to access or do...

Third Party Cookies Vulnerabilities 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Third-party cookies are cookies set by a domain other than the website the user is directly visiting. For example, a user may visit news.example.com, but that page may load ads, analytics scripts, social widgets, or tracking pixels from another domain. That external domain can set or receive its own...

Security Best Practices and Measures 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Security is a multi-layered concern involving networks, systems, applications, data, users, and operational processes. A single misconfiguration, weak password, missing patch, exposed secret, or insecure dependency can give attackers a path into a system...

Deployment Strategies 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

A deployment strategy defines how a new version of an application is released to production. The right strategy balances risk, speed, infrastructure cost, and rollback complexity...

Ci Cd 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) automate the path from a code commit to running software in production. CI catches integration problems early by building and testing on every commit. CD takes those validated artifacts and delivers them to one or more environments ...

Kubernetes 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications across a cluster of machines...

Infrastructure As Code 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of defining and managing infrastructure (servers, networks, databases, load balancers) through machine-readable configuration files instead of manual processes or ad-hoc scripts. Changes are committed to version control, reviewed, and applied automaticall...

Docker 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Docker packages an application and all of its dependencies into a lightweight, portable unit called a container. Containers share the host OS kernel but run in isolated namespaces, so they start in milliseconds and consume far less memory than virtual machines...

Web Sockets 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

WebSockets introduce an event-driven, two-way communication channel between clients and servers over a single TCP connection. Unlike traditional HTTP request-response systems, where the client sends a request and waits for the server to reply, WebSockets allow both sides to send messages whenever th...

Network Communications 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Network communications in a backend context involve the flow of data between clients and server-side systems. A client might be a browser, a mobile app, another backend service, an API gateway, or a scheduled job. The server might be a REST API, GraphQL API, gRPC service, WebSocket server, database...

Tcp and Udp 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and User Datagram Protocol, or UDP, are foundational Internet protocols that operate on top of IP. IP is responsible for addressing and routing packets between devices, while TCP and UDP define how applications send and receive data through ports on those devic...

Http Protocol 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the foundational communication protocol of the World Wide Web. It defines how clients and servers exchange messages, how requests are structured, and how responses are returned. A client might be a browser, mobile app, command-line tool, or backend service. A...

Metrics and Analysis 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

In modern distributed systems, the performance and reliability of communication channels, APIs, and network infrastructure directly affect user experience. A user may not know whether a delay comes from a database, an overloaded API server, packet loss, or a slow dependency, but they will notice tha...

Etl and Pipelines 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

ETL and ELT are foundational patterns for moving, cleaning, reshaping, and delivering data between systems...

Stream Processing 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Stream processing involves ingesting, analyzing, and acting on data as it is produced. Instead of waiting for a complete batch of data to be collected, a stream processing system handles events continuously as they arrive...

Batch Processing 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Batch processing is a method for handling large volumes of data by grouping records into a single batch and processing them together. Unlike real-time or stream processing, batch processing does not usually require immediate results. Instead, data is collected over a period of time and processed on ...

Workflow Orchestration 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

As data pipelines grow beyond a single script, they become networks of interdependent steps that must run in the right order, on a schedule, with retries on failure, and with observable state. Workflow orchestration is the discipline of managing this complexity: defining the execution order of tasks...

Lambda and Kappa Architecture 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

As data volumes grew and real-time analytics became a business requirement, engineers needed architectural patterns that could handle both historical re-computation and low-latency stream processing reliably. Lambda and Kappa architectures are the two dominant answers to that challenge...

Xml 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a W3C-standardized markup language designed to encode documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. Unlike HTML, which has a fixed set of tags, XML lets you define your own vocabulary of elements to represent arbitrary data structures...

Algorithms Summary 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

The following algorithms and data structures appear frequently in backend and distributed system design. They are useful because system design often involves trade-offs around scale, latency, storage, consistency, correctness, and fault tolerance...

Coordination Services 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

In large-scale distributed systems, many processes, microservices, or nodes must work together while running on different machines. These systems need a reliable way to agree on shared state, detect failures, elect leaders, coordinate ownership, and distribute configuration...

Indexes 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Indexing is one of the most effective ways to optimize database queries. By maintaining auxiliary data structures that map certain key values to their physical or logical locations, indexes allow a database to rapidly locate rows that match a search condition. This reduces the number of full-table s...

Isolation Levels 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Isolation levels in relational-database systems govern how simultaneously running transactions perceive one another’s changes. They sit on a spectrum that trades consistency guarantees—how “correct” every read is—against concurrency—how many transactions can safely overlap. Choosing the right level ...

Transactions 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Database transactions are a cornerstone of reliable data management. They let an application bundle multiple low-level reads and writes into a single, all-or-nothing unit so the database moves cleanly from one consistent state to another—even when dozens of users race to change the same rows or hard...

Halloween Problem 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

The Halloween Problem is a database execution-plan issue where an UPDATE operation could theoretically update the same row more than once if the database scans rows through an access path that is changed by the update itself...

Memcached 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Memcached is a high-performance, distributed, in-memory key-value cache. It is designed for one main purpose: storing small pieces of frequently accessed data in RAM so applications can avoid repeatedly querying slower systems such as relational databases, APIs, or disk-backed storage...

Database Caching 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Database caching stores frequently requested database query results, rows, aggregates, or relational lookup data in a faster layer so the application does not repeatedly execute the same expensive database operations. The main goal is to reduce database read load, lower query latency, and protect th...

Redis 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Redis is a high-performance, in-memory data store commonly used as a cache, message broker, session store, rate limiter, leaderboard engine, and fast key-value database. It is often described as a data structure server because it supports rich built-in data types such as strings, lists, sets, sorted...

Application Level Caching 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Application-level caching stores computed results or frequently accessed objects directly inside the running process or in a dedicated in-process store. Because data never leaves the application's memory space, reads are limited only by CPU and memory bandwidth — no network hop, no serialisation, an...

Memory Map 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

mmap, short for memory map, is an operating system mechanism that maps a file or device directly into a process’s virtual memory address space. Instead of reading file data explicitly with read() into a buffer, the application can access the file as if it were an array in memory. The operating syste...

Http Caching 🇺🇸

April 27, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

HTTP caching is the process of storing copies of HTTP responses so that future requests can be served without contacting the origin server. It operates at multiple layers — the browser, intermediate proxies, reverse proxies, and CDN edge nodes — and is controlled primarily through standardised HTTP ...