Backend Engineer
From data structures to services that stay up under real traffic.
Follow it and the end of each topic suggests the next one on this track.
Tools and costs
Git and the shell are where every day starts. Then learn to see what code costs: how the work grows with the size of the input, how numbers and text are stored, and where memory goes.
Code here comes in Go and JavaScript. New to Go? Start with the 90-second Go primer.
How requests travel
Every API call travels over TCP, DNS, HTTP and TLS. Knowing these layers turns timeouts and certificate errors into clues you can read.
Doing many things at once
A server handles thousands of requests at the same time. These topics show how Go and JavaScript do that, and how shared data gets corrupted when two things change it at once.
Data that survives
Many slow pages and nasty bugs trace back to the database. Indexes, transactions and replication are the parts of it you'll meet first.
Building services
Design APIs other teams can rely on, cache safely, prove it works with tests, and see what it's doing in production.
Production-ready
Retries, queues, limits and security are what separate a demo from a service people can trust with money and data.