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

Course Description

Backend Engineering from First Principles is a free online course in Technology and Programming focused on backend development for learners who want to understand how modern server-side systems actually work, from the ground up. Instead of relying on framework shortcuts, it builds strong fundamentals so you can design, debug, and scale real-world backends with confidence.

You will explore the core building blocks behind web applications, starting with how HTTP requests flow through routing and request handling, then moving into practical API architecture and REST design. Along the way, you will learn essential engineering patterns such as controllers, services, repositories, middleware, and request context, plus the critical role of serialization, validations, and transformations in building reliable services.

The course also dives deep into authentication and authorization, data persistence with Postgres, caching strategies, task queues and background processing, and full-text search with Elasticsearch. You will develop a mindset for operational excellence through error handling and fault tolerance, configuration management, and production-ready logging, monitoring, and observability.

To round out a first-principles approach, it covers graceful shutdown, backend security, and the performance and scaling concepts needed to support growing workloads, including concurrency fundamentals. By the end, you will have a clear mental model of backend systems and a practical foundation for building secure, scalable, maintainable APIs and services.