Track · Services & data

Backend

The day-to-day engineering of backend services: keeping data correct under concurrency, staying fast under load, and degrading gracefully when a dependency doesn’t.

Guides
6
Sub-topics
4
Diagrams
44

Sub-topic

Data & consistency

Transactions, isolation levels and concurrency control.

Open sub-topic
  • Distributed Systems

    Concurrency Control in Distributed Systems

    Why local locks stop working the moment you scale past one instance, and how optimistic and pessimistic concurrency control pick up the slack — with isolation levels, lock types, and working Spring/JPA code.

    ~14 min readIntermediate

Sub-topic

Reliability & performance

How services degrade under load and how to keep them alive.

Open sub-topic
  • Backend

    Backend Under Load: Eight Failure Modes

    A system design interview field guide to how backends actually degrade — connection pool saturation, cache stampedes, lock contention, hot partitions, slow queries, network bottlenecks, and GC pauses — plus how they cascade into each other in a real incident.

    ~22 min read3+ YOE
  • System Design

    Distributed Systems & Backend Patterns

    60+ patterns that keep production systems alive under failure, load, and scale — resilience, load management, caching, messaging, databases, distributed coordination, traffic routing, reliability, scalability, security, and observability.

    ~90 min readIntermediate → Advanced

Sub-topic

Concurrency

Threads, pools and the JVM concurrency toolkit behind every request.

Open sub-topic
  • Java

    Java Concurrency & Multithreading

    End-to-end, internals-first: JVM memory architecture, CPU cache visibility, all six thread states, synchronized and volatile, wait/notify, thread pools, the full java.util.concurrent toolkit, ThreadLocal, CompletableFuture, the Java Memory Model, common bugs, and a full interview Q&A.

    ~50 min readBeginner → Advanced
  • JavaNew

    Why wait() and notify() Must Be Called Inside synchronized

    The lost-wakeup race that forces the rule, what the monitor’s entry set and wait set really do, why wait() must live in a while loop, notify vs notifyAll — and how Lock/Condition inherits the same contract.

    ~32 min readIntermediate

Sub-topic

Becoming a backend engineer

Roadmaps and the skills that compound.

Open sub-topic
  • Career

    Java Backend Developer + AI Roadmap

    From core Java and concurrency to Spring Boot, databases, distributed systems, system design, production engineering, and AI — a granular roadmap focused on the concepts you actually need to understand to become a strong modern backend engineer.

    ~30 min readCollege → Senior

Explore other tracks