Backend Developer Roadmap

Navigation, file operations, text processing, piping, redirection, and process management.

Creating branches, fast-forward vs merge commits, and resolving a merge conflict.

How HTTP requests and responses work, how TLS secures HTTPS, and what HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) improve.

REST principles, HTTP verbs mapped to CRUD, and a resource-oriented URL design example.

What SQL is, the relational model, and the users/orders/products schema used throughout this section.

Atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, each explained with a concrete failure example.

URL vs header API versioning, and offset vs cursor-based pagination at scale.

The most common web application security risks from the OWASP Top 10, explained for backend developers with real examples.

The four core caching patterns compared, with Python examples and a decision table for when to use each.

What Redis is, why it is so fast, connecting via redis-cli, and common use cases.

Run RabbitMQ with Docker and use the management UI to inspect exchanges, queues, and message rates.

Run Kafka locally with Docker Compose in KRaft mode and create your first topic from the CLI.

What event-driven architecture is, events vs commands vs queries, and the benefits and costs of building systems around events.

What containers are, how they differ from VMs, installing Docker, and your first container.

What Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment mean, and why automated pipelines matter.

Testing an endpoint's status codes and response schema, plus checking idempotent methods.

Correlation IDs, distributed tracing with spans and traces, and the three pillars: logs, metrics, and traces.

Single responsibility, open/closed, Liskov substitution, interface segregation and dependency inversion — with before/after code.

How to actually split a monolith, what a real microservice codebase and deployment pipeline look like.

Scalability, availability and reliability — the core vocabulary every system design conversation starts with.