Curriculum Tracker

Course Progress & Mastery

Check off lectures as you read notes and execute live practical endpoints.

Completed 0 of 16 lectures0%

Phase 1 — Story & Philosophy

Core language-agnostic mental models and reasons protocols exist

0/4 Completed
Lecture 1: Roadmap for Backend from First Principles
31 minRoadmap, Foundations, Architecture, All 31 Topics
Open
Lecture 2: Walk the Path of a True Backend Engineer
4 minMindset, Engineering Philosophy, Node.js & Go, Scale
Open
Lecture 3: What is a Backend, How Do They Work, and Why Do We Need Them?
19 minArchitecture, Client-Server, Request Journey, DNS, Security, Nginx
Open
Lecture 4: Why Learn Backend Engineering from First Principles?
10 minPhilosophy, First Principles, Career, Mental Models, Language Agnostic
Open

Phase 2 — HTTP Deep Dive

Protocol anatomy, CORS, caching, streaming, compression, and status codes

0/5 Completed
Lecture 5: Understanding HTTP for Backend Engineers — Where It All Begins
1 hr 18 minHTTP/1.1, CORS, ETag, Caching, SSE, Idempotency, Compression, TLS, Keep-Alive, Multipart
Open
Lecture 6: Understanding Routing in Backend Applications — The 'Where' of Requests
24 minRouting, REST API, Path Params, Query Strings, Pagination, Nested Routes, Versioning, Catch-All
Open
Lecture 7: Serialization and Deserialization for Backend Engineers
22 minSerialization, Deserialization, JSON, Protobuf, YAML, XML, OSI Model, Wire Protocols
Open
Lecture 8: Authentication and Authorization for Backend Engineers
1 hr 35 minAuthentication, Authorization, JWT, Sessions, Cookies, OAuth 2.0, RBAC, Security
Open
Lecture 9: Validations & Transformations for Backend Engineers
43 minValidation, Transformation, Data Integrity, Type Casting, 400 vs 500, Security
Open

Phase 3 — Backend Architecture & Layering

Controllers, services, repositories, middlewares, and REST API design

0/2 Completed
Lecture 10: Controllers, Services, Repositories, Middlewares & Context
60 minArchitecture, Controllers, Services, Repositories, Middlewares, Request Context, Security
Open
Lecture 11: API Design & Principles: The Definitive Guide
120 minAPI Design, REST, Roy Fielding, CRUD, Idempotency, PUT vs PATCH, Sane Defaults, Swagger
Open

Phase 4 — Data Persistence & Storage Engines

PostgreSQL, schemas, migrations with dbmate, B-Tree indexes, and triggers

0/2 Completed
Lecture 12: Databases for Backend Engineers: PostgreSQL, Schemas, Migrations & Performance
2 hr 45 minPostgreSQL, Databases, Persistence, Schemas, dbmate, Migrations, B-Tree, Indexing, SQL Injection, Triggers, Pagination, ACID
Open
Lecture 13: Caching — The Secret Behind High-Performance Backend Systems
1 hr 12 minCaching, Redis, Memcached, CDN, DNS, RAM vs Disk, Cache-Aside, Write-Through, LRU, LFU, TTL, Rate Limiting, HTTP 429, Performance, System Design
Open

Phase 5 — Performance & Distributed Systems

Caching (Redis), message queues, task workers, and search engines

0/2 Completed
Lecture 14: Background Jobs & Task Queues: The Architecture of Scalable & Asynchronous Backends
55 minBackground Jobs, Task Queues, Redis, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, BullMQ, Celery, Asynchronous, Idempotency, Exponential Backoff, DLQ, Workers
Open
Lecture 15: Full-Text Search & Elasticsearch: Inverted Indexing, BM25 Scoring & Search Architecture
32 minFull-Text Search, Elasticsearch, Inverted Index, BM25, PostgreSQL TSVECTOR, Search Ranking, Typo Tolerance, Fuzzy Search, Autocomplete, CDC
Open

Phase 6 — Scaling & Production DevOps

Zero-downtime deployments, Docker containers, CI/CD, and system design

0/1 Completed
Lecture 16: Error Handling & Fault Tolerance: Building Resilient Production Backends
1 hr 15 minError Handling, Fault Tolerance, Global Middleware, Health Checks, Exponential Backoff, Circuit Breakers, Security, PII Sanitization, RFC 7807, Resilience
Open