Backend

104 articles · all categories

I've been building web backends since ~2004 when they were just called websites. With these essays I want to share the hard lessons learned about serverless, databases, APIs, and the ops that keep them alive.

Backend articles

9 articles from 2019 · show all

December 2019

How I answer the door with AWS Lambda and Twilio

October 2019

Is hot dog taco?

What if I told you modern tools let you build and launch a small webapp in 30 minutes? Complete with SSL, a .com domain, a database, a documented API, CDN hosting, fast static initial loads, and a hydrated SPA? That's the challenge I posed at Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend. The audience didn't believe me, so it was time to perform some magic. 🧙

That time monkey patching took 2 days off my life

September 2019

REST API best practice in a GraphQL world

GraphQL is taking the world by storm and it is wonderful. But in the real world, you're still dealing with REST APIs aren't you?

What happens when you push AWS credentials to GitHub

July 2019

The day I crashed production 4 times

May 2019

TypeScript for serverless lambda backends 👌

A few months ago I inherited a Kotlin project. It was an unfinished prototype and all I had to do was wrap it up and deploy. Every time I touched the project, it broke. Nothing worked. Wouldn't run on my machine, wouldn't read API requests, couldn't get tests working, if I changed some code I broke it all. That's when I realized learning a new field is super hard

April 2019

Serverless Chrome on AWS Lambda, the guide that works in 2019 and beyond

March 2019

Learning a new field is super hard, I get it now 😅