Articles

Nginx 🇺🇸

April 26, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Nginx is a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer that has grown popular for its speed, scalability, and flexibility. It can serve static files extremely quickly, proxy requests to application servers, balance traffic across multiple backends, terminate SSL/TLS connections, an...

Load Balancing 🇺🇸

April 26, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Load balancing is central to designing robust distributed systems. It distributes incoming requests or workloads across multiple servers so that no single machine becomes overloaded. Instead of clients connecting directly to one backend server, they connect to a load balancer, which decides which se...

Apache 🇺🇸

April 26, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Apache HTTP Server (commonly referred to as “Apache”) is one of the most widely used web servers in the world. It is maintained by the Apache Software Foundation and offers robust, flexible, and highly configurable capabilities for serving static and dynamic content. Over the decades, Apache has bec...

Reverse Proxies 🇺🇸

April 26, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

A reverse proxy is a server that receives incoming requests from external clients and forwards them to one or more internal servers. To the client, the reverse proxy looks like the application server. Behind the scenes, the proxy decides where the request should go...

Tls 🇺🇸

April 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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...

Tcp and Udp 🇺🇸

April 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

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

Stream Processing 🇺🇸

April 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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...

Algorithms Summary 🇺🇸

April 26, 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 26, 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...

Halloween Problem 🇺🇸

April 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 26, 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 ...

Rest 🇺🇸

April 25, 2026
Category: Backend Engineers Guide

Representational State Transfer, often referred to as REST, is an architectural style used to design web services. It uses a stateless communication model between clients and servers, relies on standard HTTP methods, and focuses on simple but powerful conventions...