Insights into Serverless and modern backends

Learning from tutorials is great! You follow some steps, learn a smol lesson, and feel like you got this. Then you go into an interview, get a question from the boss, or encounter a new situation and o-oh.

Shit, how does this work again? 馃槄

That's the problem with tutorials. They're not how the world works. Real software is a mess. A best-effort pile of duct tape and chewing gum. You need deep understanding, not recipes.

I've been building web backends since ~2004 when they were just called websites. With these curated essays I want to share the hard lessons learned. Leave your email and get the Serverless and Modern Backend email series.

Latest Serverless and Backend articles from Swizec

3 articles from 2019 show all

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. 馃

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?

May 2019

TypeScript for serverless lambda backends 馃憣

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