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  2. Backend Engineering Fundamentals
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Backend Engineering Fundamentals

Everything that goes into building a correct, fast, safe backend service: HTTP and REST, auth, SQL, indexing, transactions, and the caching/queueing patterns that keep it standing up. Language- and vendor-agnostic.

Engineering
AShared by Alex Chen
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Suggested order

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Topics

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HTTP, Status Codes and REST API Design
The contract every backend service speaks: methods and their guarantees, the status codes that actually mean something, conditional requests, and how to shape a resource API.
MCQ: 16
Fill-in: 15
Flashcards: 22
Pair match: 20
73 total questions
Authentication and Authorization
Proving who a caller is and deciding what they may do: sessions versus tokens, how JWTs really work, cookie hardening, password storage, and the OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect flows worth knowing.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 14
Pair match: 12
43 total questions
SQL Fundamentals: Joins, Aggregation and Subqueries
Reading data correctly: the join types and what each keeps, grouping and filtering in the right order, how NULL breaks intuition, and when a subquery, CTE or window function is the right tool.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 14
Pair match: 12
Locked · 43 questions inside
Indexing and Query Performance
Why a query is slow and what to do about it: B-tree indexes and their limits, covering and partial indexes, sargability, join strategies, reading a query plan, and the N+1 trap.
MCQ: 16
Fill-in: 15
Flashcards: 21
Pair match: 20
Locked · 72 questions inside
Transactions, ACID and Isolation Levels
What a transaction actually guarantees: the four ACID properties, the concurrency anomalies each isolation level does and does not prevent, MVCC, locking, deadlocks and the lost-update bug.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 14
Pair match: 12
Locked · 43 questions inside
Caching, Queues and Idempotency
Keeping a service fast and standing up under retries: caching patterns and their failure modes, delivery guarantees, idempotency keys, dead-letter queues, backoff, the outbox pattern and circuit breakers.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 14
Pair match: 12
Locked · 43 questions inside
ORMs, Connection Pooling and Data Access
How application code actually talks to the database: mapping patterns, lazy vs eager loading, connection pools and when to drop to raw SQL.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 8
Flashcards: 13
Pair match: 12
Locked · 43 questions inside
Observability: Logging, Metrics, Tracing and Error Handling
Knowing what a running service is doing: structured logs, metric types, distributed traces, the golden signals, SLOs and how to handle failure.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 8
Flashcards: 14
Pair match: 12
Locked · 44 questions inside
6 more topics in this deck

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