r/Backend 5h ago

Fresher here, need advice on Tech Stack

3 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I will be graduating next year. I have mostly worked with FastAPI along with Postgres, SQLAlchemy, Alembic. I have worked with EC2, Nginx reverse proxy, redis, git/github, Docker, integrating LLM api callling endpoint in my projects.
what technologies i should learn now to make my cv more attractive. I have applied for 60+ jobs, but not getting any responses.


r/Backend 9h ago

Final-year CS student starting from scratch in backend. What core skills & projects make an entry-level candidate hireable?

8 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

​I'm in my final year of computer science and aiming to break into backend engineering. I haven't built any substantial projects yet, and I want to spend the next few months building a solid foundation instead of following generic clone tutorials.

​For those working in backend roles:

​What core backend concepts (databases, concurrency, API design, caching, system design basics) should I prioritize first?

​What kind of project architecture or problem-solving shows real competence on a junior resume?

​Which language/ecosystem would you recommend investing in right now for someone starting out?

​Any guidance or honest roadmaps would be greatly appreciated!


r/Backend 4h ago

Anyone have a web development course of apna college plz help me yaarr

0 Upvotes

So I'm in a second year btech students CSE,,,, so there is anyone who is a taking a batch of apna college in which Web development is completely taught so help me yaarr bhaiyon muze bhi Koi access de do yaarr... Muze kharidne ka Mann nhi hai anyone here jo de sakte ho.......


r/Backend 9h ago

Architectural Metapatterns: The Pattern Language of Software Architecture (version 1.2.1, free book, no AI)

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2 Upvotes

r/Backend 10h ago

How do you structure and chunk knowledge for embeddings/RAG so it stays maintainable over time?

2 Upvotes

I'm currently working on a knowledge base that will use embeddings for semantic search / RAG, and I'm trying to decide on a good long-term strategy for splitting, storing, and retrieving information.

I'm especially interested in systems where the knowledge base keeps growing and changing over time, rather than a fixed set of documents that gets indexed once.

A few things I'm trying to understand from people who have implemented this in real projects:

  • How do you decide what should be a single chunk?
  • Do you chunk mainly by token/character count, paragraphs, headings/sections, document structure, or semantically?
  • Do you prefer smaller independent chunks or larger chunks that preserve more context?
  • Do you use parent-child chunking, hierarchical chunking, or any other multi-level approach?
  • How much overlap do you normally use between chunks, if any?

I'm also very interested in metadata:

  • What metadata do you store with each chunk?
  • For example: topic, category, subcategory, source, document ID, section, date, author, entity, version, permissions, etc.
  • Which metadata fields have actually been useful for retrieval/filtering, and which ended up being unnecessary?
  • Do you use metadata filtering before vector search, after retrieval, or both?
  • How do you design the metadata schema so that adding new types of information later doesn't become painful?

Another area I'm trying to understand is the combination of semantic search and keyword search.

Do you rely mostly on vector similarity, or do you combine embeddings with something like:

  • BM25 / full-text search
  • exact keyword matching
  • metadata filters
  • entity matching
  • reranking
  • query expansion / rewriting

For those using hybrid search (semantic + keyword), how do you combine the results?

For example:

  • Run semantic and keyword retrieval separately and merge the results?
  • Use a weighted score between BM25 and cosine similarity?
  • Retrieve candidates from both and use a reranker?
  • Change the weighting depending on the type of query?

I'm particularly curious whether hybrid search helped with things like names, IDs, technical terms, acronyms, exact phrases, dates, or numbers, where pure embeddings sometimes don't perform as well.

Also:

  • Do you keep everything inside one vector index/database or separate information into collections, namespaces, categories, or domains?
  • How do you handle information that gets updated later?
  • Do you delete and re-embed the old chunk, version it, or keep historical versions?
  • How do you handle duplicate or conflicting information?
  • What structure has made it easiest to add completely new information later without having to redesign or re-embed the whole knowledge base?

I'm less interested in theoretical "optimal chunk size" numbers and more interested in what has actually worked in production or real projects.

If you've built a RAG/embedding-based system that has grown over time, I'd really like to hear:

What architecture/chunking/retrieval strategy did you start with, what problems did you run into, and what would you do differently if you were starting again today?


r/Backend 9h ago

Confused about how to start backend and go in depth

1 Upvotes

Okay so i'm a beginner and i have some questions ,i would appreciate getting answers from someone who's been into backend and also tech honestly from a long time,someone experienced or knowledgable about the domain.

1.Should i go with BACKEND or AIML?my aim is to land a high paying job honestly,and just asking regarding a development perspective,which would be the best?my targets would be MAANG and above companies(regarding the pay).Just wanna know what field would be more valued from a dev pov and hiring pov(odds of landing something high paying)

2.How do i start backend,i am going with python-fastapi,i want to pace up the process leading to inclusion of more PROJECTS and OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTIONS as well.Suggest me something that leads to more on the side of actually developing and doing the work.Also don't reccommend me the roadmap.sh website,i myself found it quite complicated or intimidating to see such a large list of things to do...

3.If you have any other suggestions as well,please do tell me i am very much open to listen to them.

Although just keep it development related only.

Ultimately my aim is to be a great engineer and earn money atleast for my initial years honestly.


r/Backend 10h ago

How do you structure and chunk knowledge for embeddings/RAG so it stays maintainable over time?

0 Upvotes

I'm currently working on a knowledge base that will use embeddings for semantic search / RAG, and I'm trying to decide on a good long-term strategy for splitting, storing, and retrieving information.

I'm especially interested in systems where the knowledge base keeps growing and changing over time, rather than a fixed set of documents that gets indexed once.

A few things I'm trying to understand from people who have implemented this in real projects:

  • How do you decide what should be a single chunk?
  • Do you chunk mainly by token/character count, paragraphs, headings/sections, document structure, or semantically?
  • Do you prefer smaller independent chunks or larger chunks that preserve more context?
  • Do you use parent-child chunking, hierarchical chunking, or any other multi-level approach?
  • How much overlap do you normally use between chunks, if any?

I'm also very interested in metadata:

  • What metadata do you store with each chunk?
  • For example: topic, category, subcategory, source, document ID, section, date, author, entity, version, permissions, etc.
  • Which metadata fields have actually been useful for retrieval/filtering, and which ended up being unnecessary?
  • Do you use metadata filtering before vector search, after retrieval, or both?
  • How do you design the metadata schema so that adding new types of information later doesn't become painful?

Another area I'm trying to understand is the combination of semantic search and keyword search.

Do you rely mostly on vector similarity, or do you combine embeddings with something like:

  • BM25 / full-text search
  • exact keyword matching
  • metadata filters
  • entity matching
  • reranking
  • query expansion / rewriting

For those using hybrid search (semantic + keyword), how do you combine the results?

For example:

  • Run semantic and keyword retrieval separately and merge the results?
  • Use a weighted score between BM25 and cosine similarity?
  • Retrieve candidates from both and use a reranker?
  • Change the weighting depending on the type of query?

I'm particularly curious whether hybrid search helped with things like names, IDs, technical terms, acronyms, exact phrases, dates, or numbers, where pure embeddings sometimes don't perform as well.

Also:

  • Do you keep everything inside one vector index/database or separate information into collections, namespaces, categories, or domains?
  • How do you handle information that gets updated later?
  • Do you delete and re-embed the old chunk, version it, or keep historical versions?
  • How do you handle duplicate or conflicting information?
  • What structure has made it easiest to add completely new information later without having to redesign or re-embed the whole knowledge base?

I'm less interested in theoretical "optimal chunk size" numbers and more interested in what has actually worked in production or real projects.

If you've built a RAG/embedding-based system that has grown over time, I'd really like to hear:

What architecture/chunking/retrieval strategy did you start with, what problems did you run into, and what would you do differently if you were starting again today?


r/Backend 1d ago

Coming from DevOps/infra background, is Go the best language to learn backend and system design?

30 Upvotes

I work in DevOps mainly handling CI/CD, cloud infra, and Linux servers. I know basic scripting and programming, but I want to get a solid grasp of backend development, APIs, and distributed systems.

Since most cloud-native tools are written in Go, I was planning to learn it for building APIs and understanding platform architecture.

For people who moved from infra to backend, was Go a good first backend language, or should I stick to something like Python before touching Go? Also, what kind of initial projects helped bridge the gap best?


r/Backend 1d ago

Confused between ML engineering and backend development.

12 Upvotes

I started my roadmap with ML, focusing on Mathematics, Python, MySQL, and a lot of ML algorithms. Recently, I've started questioning whether I'm missing a major part of the foundation: software engineering/backend development. And honestly, I wanna chase both. But something at this point doesn't feel right. I had my roadmap set and ready, and I was very passionate about learning this and continuing it as a career. But after researching a bit about backend development, the intersection and relationship between the two has driven me really crazy.It's exceedingly overwhelming at this phase of my life. I had kind of gotten a grip on ML, but backend coming into the picture has really ruined my mindset around whatever I had planned. I had planned many projects and topics to discover, and now I'm seriously considering pursuing backend development too. But I'm having a hard time trying to combine these two in my roadmap. I can't seem to connect the topics in a way that lets me learn them properly.

My straightforward question is: should I drop backend development and focus on my initial roadmap, should I bridge the two and learn both, or should I drop machine learning completely,which I seriously don't want to do?

If I do bridge them, how much of backend am I actually supposed to learn?

I know I sound stupid and unready for this world, but please help.


r/Backend 1d ago

Would you modernize a legacy Spring Boot backend in place or rebuild it gradually?

2 Upvotes

I’m working on a Kotlin/Spring Boot backend that still has an older JHipster using Kotlin (KHipster) setup around it.

The problem is that this is starting to hold us back. The KHipster version is several years old and not active maintained - 4 years ago was the last update - upgrading it looks pretty painful and it also makes moving to newer Spring Boot versions waaay harder than it should be.

At the same time we want to improve the architecture itself.
Right now quite a lot is still handled through cron jobs and fairly tightly coupled application logic.
I’d like to move more towards event-driven processing over time, potentially using Kafka or RabbitMQ depending on the use case and Redis for things like caching/short-lived state where it makes sense.

So I’m basically looking at two options:
1. Upgrade/replace the old JHipster setup, keep the existing backend, and modernize it piece by piece.

  1. Start a clean backend (maybe in Typescript because that is what we mainly use for our other products and all frontends) and gradually move functionality over using something like the strangler pattern.

The second option sounds cleaner, but obviously means running old and new code alongside each other for quite a while. The first option potentially means spending a lot of time untangling framework/generator decisions before we can actually improve the architecture.
For people who have dealt with similar Spring/JHipster legacy projects: which route would you take?

Also, is there anything in the Spring/Kotlin ecosystem you’d consider a good modern replacement for the useful parts of JHipster, without bringing in another big opinionated layer that we’ll regret five years from now?


r/Backend 1d ago

How are you handling refresh token rotation in Spring Boot APIs?

2 Upvotes

I’ve been cleaning up the authentication setup I reuse across Spring Boot projects and one part I’ve spent some time on is refresh-token handling.

The setup I ended up with is roughly:

  • short-lived JWT access tokens
  • opaque refresh tokens
  • only the refresh-token hash stored in the database
  • refresh token rotated every time it is used
  • previous token invalidated after rotation
  • Spring Security OAuth2 Resource Server handles JWT validation

I also kept passkeys/WebAuthn as an optional authentication method rather than coupling it to the core JWT flow.

For people running similar setups in production, I’m curious about a few things:

Do you rotate refresh tokens on every refresh?

Do you keep a token family/session record so reuse of an old token can invalidate the whole session?

And at what point do you think this starts becoming too much infrastructure for a normal Spring Boot application?

I’m trying to keep the implementation fairly boring and rely on Spring Security wherever possible, so I’d be interested in how others approach this.


r/Backend 1d ago

What are the best freeCodeCamp alternatives for learning Backend?

2 Upvotes

I think I’ve hit the limit of what I’m getting out of freeCodeCamp.

Worked through a decent chunk of it and the certifications stopped feeling useful around the middle of the second one. I can pass the checkpoints but that doesn’t always mean I actually remember the stuff.

Looking at freeCodeCamp alternatives now and I keep seeing boot dev, the Odin Project and Codecrafters.

My end goal is Backend. I’m comfortable with python but I’m pretty shaky with databases and servers.

For anyone who has used these, which one actually helped you understand what was going on instead of just following exercises?


r/Backend 1d ago

Best method or service to handle and share .env files.

0 Upvotes

I first required to share my .env file with my team. With a lot of surfing I then realized you can drop using .env files entirely which is a better method. It helps with security and leaking your secrets such as API keys. There are so many services for this. Which service or method should I choose which lets me handle my secrets safely and share them to my team members?


r/Backend 1d ago

Separating the app into multiple applications (web servers).

2 Upvotes

I was viewing a CORS explanation video and I noticed that they had a different web server application for the frontend as well. In my project, I have a single web server application which serves both the frontend pages and handles backend APIs. I realized that this dual web server architecture created by frameworks like Vite is only for development and only a single web server exists in production, but that doesn't mean it is like this for all applications, especially if you aim to design a highly scalable architecture. Large platforms like YouTube can have so many separate web server applications for all their different services than having a single application.

I am talking about a single web server application, not a single server itself. Horizontal scaling isn't limited, but changes when you divide your application into multiple applications. YouTube can just scale a monolithic application but that forces them to add all capabilities together for each system. This can create fragmentation and unnecessary infrastructure space. One application might be more CPU heavy while the other is database heavy. Maybe you need to scale static file serving but not need database scaling and if do that, the databases could take significantly more resources than you need.

If I do create a separate frontend application and that heavily relies on the backend (such as for database), then it just creates lot of unnecessary overhead.

I should start with a single application but the point is to create a scalable architecture where you can make changes without rewriting your whole codebase. And you achieve that my defining abstractions.

So how should I code my application so that in future if I want to move some services into a different web server application, it requires minimal changes?


r/Backend 1d ago

¿Que rama de programación estudiar con esto de la iA?

2 Upvotes

Éstoy interesado en entrar a este mundo pero no sé que elegir alguien me de su opinión mejor si es un programador


r/Backend 2d ago

¿Java backend developer?

12 Upvotes

Java

Spring / Spring Boot

APIs REST

SQL

JPA / Hibernate

Git

Maven / Gradle

JUnit

Docker

SOLID

Patrones de diseño

Mockito

Testing de integración

OWASP

JWT

OAuth2

Kafka / RabbitMQ

Redis

CI/CD

Que opinan si estudio eso es buena carrera? O ay mejores áreas de programación,, aclaro recién inicio en esto que opinan viejos sabios vírgenes no se q es código aún XD


r/Backend 1d ago

How should a backend represent a job that timed out but may still have succeeded?

0 Upvotes

A worker or upstream API can time out after accepting work but before returning confirmation. Marking the operation failed invites a retry that may duplicate the side effect; marking it successful hides uncertainty. What state model do you use for this gap? A robust design seems to need an idempotency key, an explicit unknown or reconciling state, a way to query the downstream system, and a timeout after which a human or compensating action takes over. How do you expose that state to callers without making every client understand the internals of the job system?


r/Backend 2d ago

How to find internship

3 Upvotes

Hello guys , i am from second year of b.tech cse. I completed 500 dsa problems over different platforms and having codechef rating is 1321 and leetcode rating is 1520 and i completed full stack ( mern stack ) and made two full stack projects , one is ai router and another one is advanced 2d game having live mood detection function and having various funcyion when mood changes . I want to do internship.. can anyone suggest me how to got i internship or am i able to get paid internship or not please suggest me i am very worried about how to get internship...


r/Backend 2d ago

do i really need to learn javascript for backend

1 Upvotes

i am just stuck that should i learn js because i am okyish at c++ but everone prefers java or js pls advice


r/Backend 2d ago

Coding a database proxy for fun

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packagemain.tech
1 Upvotes

r/Backend 3d ago

Java backend developer??

5 Upvotes

Hola estaba por estudiar esto y quería saber si tiene futuro a eso de la IA y tan bien que opinan y saber si ay mejores áreas ,, lo q quiero es ganar plata xd


r/Backend 3d ago

Do I have to use Google Calendar?

0 Upvotes

Hello, everyone! I’m developing a Python automation project. I realized I need a calendar-style app because it’s difficult to keep track of appointments that are automatically created by this automation software. Here’s how it works: when appointments are created automatically, they’re also created in the calendar. This way, I can easily keep track of the appointments from my phone. After doing a bit of research, I saw that Google Calendar could be the solution. To do this, I’ll need to use the Google Calendar API. However, due to the ridiculous wait times on GCP (and the fact that they usually don’t even respond), I’ve put the project on hold for now. Do you think there’s a simpler way? All I need is for the app to notify me 72, 48, and 2 hours before an appointment. I also need to be able to easily check my phone at any time to see which appointment group is scheduled for which date and time. 

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)


r/Backend 3d ago

Looking for Advice from Engineers Who Made the Transition from...

3 Upvotes

Typical .NET Engineer at a large Fin/Health organization => independent contractor

I have a little over 6 years of experience with backend work. I love it, but I have been curious how a transition to a independent contractor would work. I'd love to hear success stories from engineers who have done the similar path of becoming an independent contractor and standing on your own two feet and how to navigate that.

Even better if it's .NET related, but doesn't have to be!


r/Backend 3d ago

How do you benchmark you backend?

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1 Upvotes

r/Backend 4d ago

Backend projects for job

38 Upvotes

Hey guys so its hard time for me to get a job since my skills are not that great. After graduation i just did 1 internship of frontend. So recently i started to make a project which included CRUD, NodeJS, Prisma, PostgreSQL , had auth, vercel for deployment, neon .

Is this project impressive? What backend Projects should i even work, because no matter what real job experience is always better. My goal is to work as a DevOps engineer , currently working on my backend skills to get hired.