Backend & Cloud Engineering
A masterclass curriculum built on first-principles computing: network protocol stacks, HTTP/3 wire formats, RESTful hypermedia architectures, ACID relational & NoSQL datastores, cryptographic authentication, distributed caching, event queues, Docker virtualization, and hyper-scale cloud deployments.
Introduction to Backend Engineering
First-principles server engineering: frontend vs backend boundaries, client-server models, TCP handshakes, TLS 1.3 negotiation, 10-stage request-response cycles, HTTP verbs and idempotency, status code taxonomy, JSON/XML wire formats, RESTful constraints, and the 7 foundational backend responsibilities.
Programming for Backend: JavaScript & TypeScript
Core backend language engineering: V8 engine memory allocation (Stack vs Managed Heap), static typing with TypeScript, CJS vs ESM module lifecycles, OOP and SOLID dependency injection, operational error handling, binary buffers, stream backpressure, libuv event loop phases, Twelve-Factor configuration, and structured logging.
Linux Operating System & Command Line
Cloud infrastructure foundations: Linux monolithic kernel architecture, User Space vs Kernel Space (syscalls), Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), Inode mechanics, POSIX octal permissions, users and PAM sudo, process states and signals, systemd daemonization, OpenSSH cryptographic hardening, defensive Bash scripting, and log observability with journald.
Version Control Systems & Distributed Git
Distributed version control foundations: Git content-addressable storage engine, the 4 core objects (blobs, trees, commits, tags), Three Trees state machine (Working Tree, Index, HEAD), pointer branch economics, fast-forward vs 3-way merges, conflict physics and resolution, GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket platforms, enterprise collaboration (GitHub Flow vs Trunk-Based), and GPG-signed semantic release tags.
Databases: Relational (SQL), NoSQL & Caching
Complete persistence engineering: Relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL), DDL schemas, B-Tree index traversal ($O(\log N)$), ACID transactions and ANSI isolation levels, normalization (1NF to BCNF), ORM tools (Prisma, Sequelize, SQLAlchemy, Hibernate) & the N+1 problem, MongoDB BSON document stores, CAP theorem, and low-latency in-memory caching with Redis Cache-Aside.
REST API Design & Production Engineering
Production contract engineering: Roy Fielding's 6 REST constraints, resource-oriented URI design, cursor-based vs offset pagination, RFC 7807 standardized problem details error envelopes, Express middleware pipelines (onion pattern), fail-fast Zod input validation, API versioning strategies, atomic Redis sliding-window rate limiters, OpenAPI 3.1 Swagger specifications, and automated Postman/Newman testing.
Authentication, Authorization & Identity Systems
Production security & identity architecture: Memory-hard password hashing (Argon2id & Bcrypt) with salts, stateful sessions vs stateless tokens, HttpOnly and SameSite cookie defense, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) structure, dual-token access/refresh rotation with automatic replay detection, OAuth 2.0 PKCE authorization code flows, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), secure password resets, and Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) MFA.
Backend Security & Threat Mitigation
Production defensive systems engineering: OWASP Top 10 threat taxonomy, parameterized SQL/NoSQL injection defense, contextual output encoding for XSS, Synchronizer Token CSRF defense, CORS preflight engines, HTTP security headers with Helmet (CSP, HSTS), AES-256-GCM authenticated envelope encryption, secrets management, and binary magic-byte file validation with S3 presigned URLs.
Caching Architectures & Performance Optimization
Production performance engineering: The hardware latency pyramid, HTTP conditional caching with ETags (304 Not Modified), distributed Redis Cache-Aside, Thundering Herd (cache stampede) mitigation via single-flight mutex locks, PostgreSQL EXPLAIN query optimization, covering indexes, Brotli HTTP compression, k6 percentile latency benchmarking (p95/p99), and Google SRE Golden Signals monitoring.
Asynchronous Processing & Event-Driven Architecture
Production distributed systems decoupling: Synchronous latency chains vs temporal decoupling, message brokers with Dead-Letter Queues (DLQ) and retry policies, RabbitMQ AMQP 0-9-1 exchange topologies, Apache Kafka partitioned commit logs and consumer offsets, Redis background job queues with BullMQ, notification architectures, distributed cron mutex locks, HMAC-SHA256 authenticated webhooks, and Event-Driven Pub/Sub with Saga orchestration.
System Design Foundations & Scalable Architecture
Production distributed systems design: Monolithic vs Microservices trade-offs, Layer 4/7 load balancing algorithms, stateless horizontal compute, Primary-Replica database replication and replication lag mitigation, Consistent Hashing sharding topologies, High Availability mathematics (Nines of SLA), fault tolerance via Circuit Breakers, and the CAP/PACELC distributed theorems.
Cloud Computing Fundamentals & Infrastructure Governance
Modern enterprise cloud computing: NIST SP 800-145 cloud standard, IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS service models, Cloud Shared Responsibility security boundaries, Public/Private/Hybrid/Multi-Cloud topologies, AWS vs Azure vs GCP hyperscalers, global infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones, Edge PoPs), Type 1 Bare-Metal virtualization and AWS Nitro architectures, Block (EBS) vs Object (S3) vs File (EFS) storage tiers, IAM Least Privilege security policies, and FinOps cloud cost governance.