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

7 articles from 2022 show all

October 2022

Why PATCH endpoints matter

A painful lesson from production that brought several engineers almost to tears: *Please* add PATCH endpoints to your public APIs.

Over-engineering tweet embeds with web components for fun and privacy

A way to embed tweets in static sites with full pre-renders and live updates using just 9kB of client-side JavaScript, 2 HTTP requests, and full reader privacy 鉁岋笍

June 2022

You are allowed to invent HTTP status codes

A fun problem for RESTful APIs: Did you get 404 because your URL is wrong or because the resource wasn't found?

May 2022

What microservices are for

Microservices are a pain in the ass. They turn every system into a byzantine mess of complexity. But this week ... they saved my butt.

April 2022

Promise.allSettled, a wonderful tool for resilient code

The pros and cons of different approaches to writing resilient code that handles partial failures

January 2022

Wow API Gateway v2 is fast

A story of how my performance hunch was totally wrong and the answer that sped up an AWS Lambda 33%

Using DynamoDB Streams with the Serverless Framework

DynamoDB Streams are a convenient way to react to changes in your database. And surprisingly easy to use 馃コ