Free to read

Defend your backend design choices

Build the systems senior interviews actually ask about. Walk in with the reps to defend every choice.

Start readingPreview curriculum

Still deciding? Ask first.

Message a mentor about fit, prerequisites, or where to start. Replies come on WhatsApp, usually within a day.

  • Curriculum fit, prerequisites, or where to start
  • Honest answer, no pressure to enroll

Taught by an engineer who has shipped this

  • ISO 27001

    Led the engineering work behind the certification of a regulated EU platform.

  • Series A platform

    Architected the case-management product that became the business a €11.6M round was raised on.

  • 3x faster deploys

    Cut time-to-deploy by migrating to Kubernetes on GCP with deploy-on-merge.

Become the backend engineer who can defend their design choices. Build the systems senior interviews actually ask about: resumable uploads, seat lockers under load, event sourcing, idempotent payments, microservices. Each project ships with two real solution approaches and a written tradeoff you can walk into a system design interview with.

Become the backend engineer who can defend every design choice in a senior interview.

What you'll ship

Real projects, not toy demos.

  • A resumable file uploader that survives network failure on tight memory
  • A seat reservation system that prevents double-sells under real concurrency
  • A live auction with real-time bidding over websockets
  • A geospatial search service with two indexing strategies
  • An event-sourced ledger that can reconstruct any historical balance
  • An idempotent payment endpoint that survives duplicate webhooks
  • A feature flag service with gradual rollout and kill switches
  • A capstone microservices stack with an API gateway

What you'll learn

You finish able to:

  • Design under hard constraints, not vibes
  • Choose between pessimistic and optimistic concurrency for the right reasons
  • Build idempotent APIs that survive duplicate requests
  • Reconstruct state from an event log
  • Reason about cache stampedes, dead-letter queues, and connection pools
  • Defend tradeoffs in system design interviews from real reps
  • Ship a microservices stack with a real API gateway

Curriculum

Real backend systems with real solution tradeoffs.

  1. 01

    Data infrastructure

    Resumable uploads, link unfurling, auth as its own service, and reliable async queues.

  2. 02

    High scale

    Seat lockers, live auctions, real-time scorecards, and geospatial queries under load.

  3. 03

    Distributed systems

    Event sourcing, idempotent payments, feature flags, and a microservices capstone.

  4. 04

    Production lifecycle

    Hardening, observability, and the on-call story that keeps real systems alive.

  5. 05

    Production operations

    Container orchestration, secrets, blue-green, and the portfolio story.

Who it's for

Is this for you?

Mid-level backend engineers

who want to push toward senior but only ever ship CRUD at work

Engineers prepping for system design interviews

who can recite patterns but have never actually built any of them

Indie hackers

whose side projects just hit real users and are starting to break

Self-taught seniors

who want production reps without the politics of changing jobs

FAQ

Common questions.

  • How is this different from the Backend Masterclass?

    The Masterclass teaches the language. The Accelerator makes you fluent under pressure. Masterclass walks you from zero to production patterns. Accelerator drops you into real briefs and forces you to defend a design choice for each one.

  • Do I need backend experience already?

    Yes. You should be comfortable building REST APIs and querying a database. If you cannot ship a CRUD service yet, start with the Backend Masterclass first.

  • Why two solutions per project?

    Because real engineering is about tradeoffs. Pessimistic vs optimistic locking. Simple cache vs cache with stampede protection. Knowing both options and when each one is right is how you stop sounding like a junior in design reviews.

  • Will these projects look good in interviews?

    Yes. Each one is a runnable repo with a written tradeoff analysis. You can ship them to GitHub, link them on your resume, and walk through the design out loud. That is the conversation that promotes engineers.