Backend, APIs, and System Design
API design, database choice, distributed patterns, and the engineering decisions that compound for years.
60 posts · page 2 of 3
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Designing an API That Customers Will Not Curse In Five Years
An API that customers love at year five was designed for year five. The decisions made at week one shape what is possible in year five. Here is the discipline that produces APIs customers integrate enthusiastically.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Database Partitioning: Strategies and Pitfalls
Partitioning solves real problems on real large tables. It also creates new problems if used preemptively or with the wrong partition key. Here is the honest read on when and how.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Database Indexes: A Practical Primer for SaaS Engineers
Most database performance problems in SaaS are missing indexes. The fix is mechanical. The discipline is to know which indexes to add and which to skip. Here is the primer.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
CRDTs in Production: A Real World Look
CRDTs solve a specific class of distributed problems and create complications everywhere else. The teams that use them well pick the problem deliberately. The teams that adopt them as a default regret it.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
CQRS in Practice: When the Complexity Earns Its Keep
CQRS is a pattern that earns its complexity in specific cases and costs more than it gives in most. Here is the honest read on when separating reads from writes pays back.
11 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
CockroachDB and TiDB: When Distributed SQL Pays Off
Distributed SQL solves problems most SaaS does not have. When it solves yours, it pays back richly. When it does not, the operational tax is brutal. Here is the honest decision.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Choosing a Cache: Redis vs Memcached vs In Memory
In memory for the smallest scope. Memcached for pure key value at scale. Redis for almost everything else. The three cover different shapes of problem and they are not interchangeable.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
CDN Strategy for a Global SaaS in 2026
A CDN is not just for static assets in 2026. The right strategy caches API responses, runs edge functions, and protects the origin from traffic spikes. Here is the modern approach.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Building Internal APIs vs Public APIs: Different Disciplines
Internal APIs and public APIs share a name and almost nothing else. The disciplines are different, the constraints are different, and the worst engineering decisions in SaaS often come from treating them the same.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Building APIs That Survive Five Years of Customer Change Requests
An API that survives five years was designed to. The ones that did not survive were designed for the first customer. Here is the discipline that keeps the API stable while the product evolves underneath it.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Batch Processing vs Streaming: The Choice Founders Often Conflate
Batch is for periodic work over a window of data. Streaming is for continuous work over an unbounded source. Founders pick streaming because it sounds modern. Most of them needed batch. Here is how to tell the difference.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Background Jobs at Scale: Inngest, Trigger, Cron, and Beyond
Inngest and Trigger.dev have made durable background jobs a managed product. Cron is still the right tool for scheduled work. Knowing which to reach for is the difference between a quiet platform and a constant incident.
13 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Async Job Failure Recovery: Patterns That Actually Work
Every async job will fail eventually. The patterns that recover gracefully are the ones I drop into every client project. Here are the five that matter and the order to add them.
11 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
API Gateway Patterns for SaaS: Kong, Tyk, AWS API Gateway Compared
An API gateway is either the cleanest piece of your architecture or the slowest. The right choice depends on whether you optimize for vendor managed simplicity or self hosted control. Here is the call I make per project.
11 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
API Documentation That Developers Actually Read
Most API documentation is reference. The kind developers actually use is part reference, part tutorial, part recipe book. Here is the structure that works.
11 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
ACID vs BASE: When Each Belongs in Your Architecture
ACID and BASE are not religions, they are tools. Picking the wrong one costs you data integrity or performance. Here is the call I make for client projects, and the reasoning behind each side.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Why Your Service Should Have Two Health Checks Not One
A single /health endpoint is doing two jobs that contradict each other. One health check is for the load balancer. A different one is for the orchestrator. Conflating them is how a healthy service gets restarted into an outage.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
The Health Check Endpoint: Less Trivial Than It Looks
Why health check endpoints are more complex than returning 200 OK -- and how to design them to actually tell you whether your service is healthy.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Timeouts: The Setting Most Engineers Get Wrong
Working notes on timeouts: the setting most engineers get wrong. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on backend, apis, and system design from someone who has shipped the work.
11 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
The Backend Engineer's Reading List for 2026
The books, resources, and reference materials that actually make backend engineers better. Curated from what I return to on client projects.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
The Boring API: Why Predictability Beats Cleverness
Why the most durable APIs are the most predictable ones, and why clever API design decisions become maintenance nightmares within two years.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Why Logical Deletes Are Almost Always a Mistake
Soft deletes feel safe until the schema rot and query complexity make everything harder. Here is the case against them, when they are genuinely warranted, and what to use instead.
12 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
The Soft Delete Trap: A Pattern That Catches Up With Teams
Working notes on the soft delete trap: a pattern that catches up with teams. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on backend, apis, and system design from someone who has shipped the work.
11 min read
- Backend, APIs, and System Design
Time Series Data in SaaS: When to Pull in TimescaleDB or InfluxDB
Working notes on time series data in saas: when to pull in timescaledb or influxdb. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on backend, apis, and system design from someone who has shipped the work.
12 min read