40 concepts to master Modern Backend Engineering

 

 

 

40 concepts to master Modern Backend Engineering:

1. System Design Fundamentals: Load balancing, replication, and fault tolerance.
2. API Design: RESTful principles, GraphQL schemas, and gRPC/protobuf.
3. API Versioning Strategies: URL, header, and media type versioning.
4. Authentication & Authorization: JWT, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and RBAC/ABAC.
5. Database Design & Modeling: Relational normalization and NoSQL schema patterns.
6. SQL Mastery: Complex queries, indexing strategies, and query optimization.
7. NoSQL Databases: Document (MongoDB), Key-Value (Redis), Wide-Column (Cassandra), Graph (Neo4j).
8. Database Transactions & ACID Compliance: Isolation levels and handling concurrency.
9. Caching Strategies: In-memory (Redis/Memcached), CDN, and database caching layers.
10. Message Queues & Brokers: Kafka, RabbitMQ, and AWS SQS for asynchronous communication.
11. Event-Driven Architecture: Designing systems around events and choreography.
12. Microservices vs. Monoliths: Trade-offs, decomposition patterns, and bounded contexts.
13. Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, and service mesh (Istio/Linkerd).
14. Serverless Architecture: Functions-as-a-Service (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions) and its limits.
15. API Gateways: Routing, rate limiting, and request aggregation.
16. Rate Limiting & Throttling: Token bucket, fixed window, and distributed rate limiting.
17. Data Streaming: Real-time processing with Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or Apache Pulsar.
18. Search Engine Integration: Implementing full-text search with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
19. Background Job Processing: Designing reliable systems with Celery, Sidekiq, or BullMQ.
20. File & Object Storage: Handling uploads and serving static assets at scale.
21. WebSockets & Real-Time Communication: Building live dashboards and chat features.
22. Configuration Management: Environment-based configs and feature flag services.
23. Health Checks & Readiness Probes: Building resilient systems with proper lifecycle management.
24. Distributed Tracing: Using Jaeger or Zipkin to track requests across services.
25. Centralized Logging: Aggregating and analyzing logs with the ELK Stack or Loki.
26. Metrics & Monitoring: Implementing Prometheus, Grafana, and crafting meaningful alerts.
27. CI/CD Pipelines: Automated testing, building, and deployment strategies.
28. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, Pulumi, and AWS CDK for reproducible environments.
29. Secret Management: Securely storing and accessing API keys and credentials.
30. Database Migrations: Managing schema changes safely and rollback strategies.
31. Disaster Recovery & Backups: Designing for data durability and business continuity.
32. Performance Profiling & Optimization: Identifying bottlenecks in application code and databases.
33. Scalability Patterns: Horizontal vs. vertical scaling, sharding, and consistent hashing.
34. Security Best Practices: SQL injection, XSS, CSRF prevention, and security headers.
35. Testing Strategies: Unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing for backend services.
36. Blue-Green & Canary Deployments: Minimizing risk during releases.
37. Graceful Degradation & Circuit Breakers: Building systems that fail well.
38. Internationalization (i18n) & Localization (l10n): Designing APIs for a global audience.
39. Cost Optimization: Right-sizing resources and managing cloud spend.
40. The Backend Engineer's Mindset: Problem-solving, trade-off analysis, and continuous learning.

Master these concepts, and you’ll be equipped to architect and build the robust engines that power modern applications.