Free online courseBackend Engineering from First Principles (HTTP, REST APIs, Postgres, Caching, Security, Scaling)

Course Description

Strong backend systems rarely come from copying patterns blindly. They come from understanding first principles: how requests move across the internet, how servers interpret them, how data is stored and retrieved, and what breaks in production. This free online course is designed to help you build that foundation so you can read unfamiliar codebases with confidence, make better design decisions, and debug issues faster when the real world gets messy.

You will start where every backend journey truly begins: HTTP. By learning why HTTP is stateless, how routing works, and how data is serialized and deserialized between client and server, you gain a clear mental model of what happens between a request and a response. From there, you will connect essential application concepts such as validation and transformation, authentication versus authorization, and the responsibilities of controllers, services, repositories, middleware, and request context. Instead of memorizing frameworks, you will learn what these pieces are trying to achieve and how they fit together.

As you progress, you will strengthen your ability to design clean REST APIs, choose appropriate HTTP methods, and implement behavior that stays predictable as systems evolve. You will also build practical database understanding with Postgres, including how and why traditional storage persists data, and how backend performance can collapse when queries and indexing are treated as an afterthought.

Modern backends rely on more than a database. You will explore caching, background jobs and task queues for responsiveness, and fast search with Elasticsearch when naïve SQL patterns stop scaling. The course also emphasizes production readiness: fault tolerance through consistent error handling, configuration discipline across environments, logging/monitoring/observability, and graceful shutdown so deployments do not drop work in flight.

Finally, you will move into the topics that separate functional apps from reliable platforms: security fundamentals, scaling strategies, performance engineering metrics that reflect real user experience, the importance of stateless design for horizontal scaling, and why concurrency is essential for most API servers. With video lessons plus exercises, you will develop the practical intuition needed to build backends that are easier to operate, safer to expose, and ready to grow.