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04 · Sub-discipline

API Design + Backend Architecture

REST, GraphQL, tRPC — versioned, observable, integration-ready.

Backends that other teams actually want to integrate against. Versioning, pagination, auth, rate limiting, webhooks, queues, scheduled jobs — and an observability story that doesn’t end at console.log.

What you get

4 pillars

API design discipline

Resource modelling, pagination, error envelopes, versioning — designed before the first endpoint ships.

Workers + queues

Background workers for sync, ingestion, reconciliation. BullMQ / Celery / Convex queues, with retries and DLQ.

Webhooks + integrations

Inbound webhooks idempotent by design. Outbound webhooks signed, retried, and audit-logged.

Observability + SLOs

Structured logs, request IDs, traces, error budgets. Know what is broken before the customer tells you.

Tools we reach for

Not exhaustive
FastAPINode.jsHonotRPCConvexBullMQCeleryOpenTelemetry

Frequently asked

4 questions

REST, GraphQL, or tRPC — which should I pick?

tRPC for full-stack TypeScript with end-to-end type safety. GraphQL when multiple clients need flexible queries against the same schema. REST when you need maximum client compatibility, public APIs, or third-party consumers. Picked per use case, not per fashion.

How are long-running jobs and background work handled?

Worker queues — BullMQ (Node), Celery (Python), or Vercel Workflow DevKit. Jobs survive deploys, retry on failure, and emit progress events. Cron-style schedules and webhooks trigger work without coupling to the request lifecycle.

How is authentication built?

JWT or session-based, OAuth for third-party login (Google, GitHub, Apple), and MFA via TOTP or email codes. For team apps: role-based access at API and database (Postgres RLS) layers. Clerk, Auth0, or Supabase Auth depending on requirements.

What observability ships with the backend?

OpenTelemetry traces, structured logs, error tracking (Sentry), and uptime monitoring. Dashboards for request latency, error rate, queue depth, and external dependency health. Alerts route to Slack or PagerDuty on threshold breach.

Sounds like the bucket you’re in?

Tell me what you’re trying to build. I’ll send a written proposal within 48 hours of our discovery call.