software-backend

Software Backend Engineering

Use this skill for backend service implementation and review: API boundaries, auth, data access, jobs, caching, observability, and production hardening. If the main question is platform selection, system topology, or API-contract design without implementation, hand off early.

Defaults

When this skill is active, prefer these defaults unless the repo or user says otherwise:

• validate at the boundary and keep types explicit
• use PostgreSQL plus pooling for relational workloads
• use structured logs, OpenTelemetry, explicit timeouts, and rate limits
• make mutations idempotent and background work retry-safe
• use RFC 9457 Problem Details for machine-readable errors

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

• building or reviewing REST, GraphQL, tRPC, Connect, or gRPC services
• implementing auth, validation, rate limits, caching, queues, or webhook handling
• modelling schemas and running safe migrations
• hardening service behavior for retries, timeouts, and observability
• scaffolding or refactoring a backend with production defaults

Route Elsewhere

• frontend-only work -> software-frontend
• infrastructure provisioning and cluster design -> ops-devops-platform
• API contract design without implementation -> dev-api-design
• BaaS platform selection (data/auth layer) -> software-baas-platforms
• PaaS hosting selection (compute layer: Vercel, Fly.io, Railway, Render, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy) -> software-paas-hosting
• SQL tuning and indexing deep dives -> data-sql-optimization
• security reviews and threat modelling -> software-security-appsec
• broader system architecture -> software-architecture-design

Workflow

1. Confirm the real constraint: latency, team skill, runtime, compliance, data model, or delivery speed.
2. Choose the transport and framework based on that constraint, not on trend-chasing.
3. Define the boundary:
   • request and response contracts
   • auth and authorization rules
   • error model
   • idempotency and rate limiting
4. Define the data path:
   • schema and migrations
   • transaction boundaries
   • pooling and query budgets
   • cache and invalidation rules
5. Define the async path:
   • queue semantics
   • retry ownership
   • deduplication and DLQ
6. Add operability before calling it complete:
   • timeouts and cancellation
   • health checks
   • structured logs and traces
   • deploy and rollback expectations

ASCII Flow

Backend task
  -> Define endpoint, job, service, or data boundary
  -> Confirm runtime, framework, persistence, and integration contracts
  -> Design request validation, auth, errors, and idempotency
  -> Implement bounded slice with tests and observability
  -> Check performance, security, and rollout risk
  -> Verify behavior and document follow-up handoffs

Technology Selection

Pick based on the strongest operational constraint:

• TypeScript-heavy team -> Fastify, Hono, or NestJS plus Prisma or Drizzle
• audited SQL and predictable concurrency -> Go with sqlc/pgx
• Python ecosystem or ML adjacency -> FastAPI plus SQLAlchemy
• enterprise .NET stack -> ASP.NET Core plus EF Core or explicit SQL access
• memory safety and explicitness -> Rust with Axum plus SQLx
• edge or serverless first -> lightweight stateless handlers with hard CPU and timeout budgets

Use software-baas-platforms first when the real requirement is "ship auth, storage, and realtime quickly with less custom service code."

Backend Non-Negotiables

Performance and Reliability Triage

When a service is slow or unstable, debug in this order:

Do not add caching before you understand the real bottleneck.

Operational Playbooks

• use references/operational-playbook.md for full service design and review checklists
• use qa-resilience when retries, deadlines, breakers, or degraded-mode behavior are the main question
• use dev-api-design when the contract itself is the main artifact

Production Readiness Checklist

Before marking a service production-ready:

• All mutating endpoints have idempotency keys or safe-retry semantics
• Every outbound call has an explicit timeout (no framework-default infinite waits)
• Health endpoint distinguishes liveness from readiness
• Correlation IDs propagated from inbound request to all downstream calls and logs
• DLQ policy defined for every queue consumer (what happens to poison messages)
• New query plans verified (EXPLAIN ANALYZE) before merge to main
• Rollback procedure documented and smoke-test list exists

Known Traps

• Introducing asynchronous jobs to hide a broken synchronous path instead of fixing the contract, timeout budget, or workload shape.
• Shipping retries without deadlines, jitter, and idempotency keys, then multiplying load during incidents.
• Changing API or webhook behavior without a compatibility window, replay plan, or structured error-versioning posture.
• Adding caches before proving whether the real bottleneck is query shape, pooling, lock contention, or outbound dependency latency.
• Treating background consumers as “fire and forget” even though poison-message handling, replay semantics, and observability are undefined.

Common Anti-Patterns

• Letting framework defaults define the service contract, error model, and cancellation semantics.
• Using one generic repository abstraction for every query, including hot paths that need explicit SQL, batching, or shape control.
• Mixing request handling, domain logic, external side effects, and persistence concerns in one controller or handler.
• Relying on eventual retries to clean up non-idempotent side effects.
• Calling a backend “production ready” before timeouts, readiness checks, trace correlation, and rollback smoke tests exist.

Navigation

Core references

• references/backend-best-practices.md
• references/edge-deployment-guide.md
• references/infrastructure-economics.md
• references/database-patterns.md
• references/message-queues-background-jobs.md
• references/rpc-and-transport-patterns.md
• references/go-best-practices.md
• references/rust-best-practices.md
• references/python-best-practices.md
• references/nodejs-best-practices.md
• references/csharp-best-practices.md
• data/sources.json

Shared review utilities

• ../software-clean-code-standard/assets/checklists/backend-api-review-checklist.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/assets/checklists/secure-code-review-checklist.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/references/auth-utilities.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/references/error-handling.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/references/config-validation.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/references/resilience-utilities.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/references/logging-utilities.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/references/testing-utilities.md
• ../software-clean-code-standard/references/observability-utilities.md

Templates

• assets/nodejs/template-nodejs-prisma-postgres.md
• assets/nodejs/template-nodejs-fastify-drizzle-postgres.md
• assets/go/template-go-fiber-gorm.md
• assets/go/template-go-chi-sqlc-pgx.md
• assets/rust/template-rust-axum-seaorm.md
• assets/rust/template-rust-axum-sqlx.md
• assets/python/template-python-fastapi-sqlalchemy.md
• assets/csharp/template-csharp-aspnet-efcore.md

Related Skills

Gate before invoking any foundation below: Each foundation has a When to Apply / When to Skip section. If your task matches a skip-condition, route to the foundation it names instead — don't pull in primitives the task doesn't need.

• software-architecture-design
• software-security-appsec
• ops-devops-platform
• qa-resilience
• qa-testing-strategy
• foundations-queueing-theory — Little's Law, M/M/c, and Kingman's formula for queue sizing in message-queue and rate-limiter design
• foundations-distributed-systems — CAP, consistency models, quorum sizing, and idempotency contracts for service mesh and RPC patterns
• foundations-reliability-theory — MTBF/MTTR, availability composition, and error-budget math for SLO-driven backend design
• software-code-review
• dev-api-design
• data-sql-optimization

Fact-Checking

• Known bugs, regressions, framework/compiler/runtime footguns, and version-specific crash or workaround guidance must be verified against current primary web sources before being treated as current fact.
• Verify current runtime versions, support windows, framework capabilities, and cloud-platform constraints before final answers.
• Prefer official docs and release or support policy pages for version-sensitive recommendations.
• If web access is unavailable, mark version or support guidance as unverified.

Learnings Loop

Before applying this skill on a non-trivial task, read learnings.consolidated.md in this directory (and learnings.md if present).

After applying it, if you encountered a pattern worth remembering, a mistake worth preventing, or a domain fact that surprised you, append one dated bullet to learnings.md via agents-skills-feedback-loop/scripts/append_learning.py. Do not modify SKILL.md itself.