I am building a real time app that also has a group chat. I will need a websocket connection for this, which introduces complexity at the system level for scaling, but that's not the point of this post.

From what I've read, websocket gives low latency bidirectional byte channel between a client and server with no protocol. REST gives you a request response protocol with status codes and integration with infra that has been using it for a long time.

I will have to open a websocket connection for my app to work. So I am tempted to use websocket for CRUD operations on my app as well that are outside of the group chat. Like when user changes settings or changes profile picture I might as well send a websocket message which has lower latency compared to an HTTP request which will create a new connection on each request. For some reason I think this is not the best practice. Do other apps do it this way? I see apps like reddit or insta where when you change your user settings they are instant, like toggling a setting on/off. It doesn't look like a POST request.

I'm asking the classic build vs buy...

Do you prefer to build your own utilities (like OCR, PDF extraction, audio processing, video processing, VAT validation, IBAN lookup, PDF conversion, doc conversion, file conversion, markdown conversion), or do you prefer to use a utility API for that? If you use a vendor for this, how do you manage multiple vendors?

I ask because as the product grows, the number of utilities, maintenance, and engineering hours also increases, so how do you tackle that?

I'm a full stack engineer with about 3 YoE. I work with AWS in my day job, but I'm using Railway for my own saas which has paying users.

Railway's let me down too many times now, compromising my secrets was the last straw.

Problem is i'm only paying $20 a month currently and I'd like to keep it that way ideally. AWS makes sense as my app is increasing in user base each month but I also don't want to jump to like double the infra cost.

I need to host redis, and two server instances preferably for redundancy.

Any recommendations? AWS feels like the way to go because I guess I can improve my AWS skills for my day job and I can be sure I can grow in size there?

I’m glad deployments have resumed, but the October 21 incident would still make me reconsider where I’m hosting important applications.

The question I’d want answered is straightforward: if something like this happens again, how will we be able to make changes and recover their services?

That matters more to me than another assurance that things will improve. Earlier reliability problems already give customers a reason to be cautious, and this incident adds to that concern.

I’d want to see a clear explanation of what changed and why the recovery process will work better next time. Until then, looking at other options seems entirely reasonable.

Migration is inconvenient. So is staying with a provider you no longer feel comfortable depending on.

Hi everyone! I’m a final-year B.Tech student preparing for Java backend fresher roles. I’ve been working on Core Java, DSA, and projects, and I’m confused about what to prioritize next.

Should I focus more on Spring Boot and building backend projects, or start studying system design?

For fresher interviews, how much system design is usually expected? Which Spring Boot topics should I be comfortable with before applying?

I’d appreciate advice from anyone who has recently landed a Java backend role or interviews freshers.

is xhamster the website which follows the most restful design?

Hi everyone I am trying to build a golang blog project and I have done with thunder client part and designed the html pages but now I am very very confused that how I can do user authentication with middlware and all. I have never worked with middlewares and jwt auth part so if anyone have something from where I get some clarity please share.

I am developing a mobile app, which has a react native frontend, nest.js as the backend and for db and authentication, I'm planning to use supabase.

Now, currently as my app is in its initial stages I'm planning to use the supabase, as it free tier provides ample limits for my use case.

However, in later years if my app grows. I may think of switching to a cheaper alternative.

So, what I am planning to follow is for authentication, route the requests to my backend and inturn the backend will communicate with the supabase to authenticate the user. The backend will save the supabase token, create a separate session token for the user and send it back to the user.

My main reason for doing this is, I want the authentication to be provider independent and any changes needed should be done on the backend instead of the app.

Please let me know, if this approach is correct. What are the pros and cons. How much effort it would require to implement this. Will the security concerns increase if my backend starts handling this instead of the supabase only.

I also want to integrate the google and apple login as well. How will this approach affect it?

Also, if there any other better approaches, please let me know.

I've been doing Vue and TypeScript for 5 years and I've reached the point where I can build anything in the browser and nothing behind it. Every time I touch our API I'm copying patterns from the backend team without understanding them. I want to learn Go properly, not just syntax but HTTP servers, databases and concurrency, and my company will cover a course. Shortlist right now is Ardan Labs, Boot.dev and the Go material on Frontend Masters. I don't want to start at what a variable is, so where would you start coming from frontend?

Hello, I'm confused on what type of projects a beginner should begin with and to continue the journey of learning backend dev.

Is there any good reliable roadmap of projects to follow, which will allow me at the end of the day, to gather the experience to land a job?

Especially the link I provided, since I cannot be the judge of deciding is it actually worth following it.

hi all! I am interested in becoming a backend dev as I like the logic side and problem solving aspects.

Is learning the JS, MySQL/PostgreSQL (or MongoDB), and Node/Express enough to get started in that field?
I have taken a bootcamp for full-stack web development and I really liked the backend side of things and would like to pursue that but I am not sure with junior roles becoming more scarce.

Thank you!

Well the title says it all. I want to start learning backend and databases properly. Anyone has recommendations?

I'm a software developer working at a bank, and I feel like we're way behind when it comes to AI adoption.

Every time AI comes up, the conversation is mostly around security, compliance, data privacy, etc. I understand these are important, especially in banking, but it feels like we're moving extremely slowly.

For example, our bank deployed a GPT model through Azure AI Foundry and built an internal ChatGPT-like interface for employees. That's pretty much the extent of AI adoption I've seen so far.

Meanwhile, I keep seeing people talk about using Claude Code, Cursor, AI agents, and building AI-powered features using LLM APIs.

I'm curious how things work at other companies.

• Are you actually building AI-powered features using APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.?

• How does your company approach new AI initiatives? Do developers get to experiment and propose ideas, or does everything have to go through multiple approval processes?

• How are you handling security and compliance concerns when integrating AI into existing applications?

• Are companies actually using AI agents and automation in production, or is most of it still experimentation?

I'm especially interested in hearing from developers working at banks, fintech companies, or other large enterprises.

I want to understand what real-world AI adoption looks like beyond just building an internal ChatGPT wrapper.

How is your company approaching this? Are you seeing meaningful AI adoption, or is it mostly hype and internal chatbots?

Hi builders,

I m a software engineer with 25 years coding experience, so i guess i have a deep understanding of software. Recently i start using claude code and cursor ai, it is amazing and give me 100x productivity, and i never need to code by hand anymore, and it open an opportunity for non technical users to start building thing, which is awesome.

Then i start wondering, is backend and database really necessary? I mean yes of course you need data, then you need backend logic to handle data, provide APIs or handling OAuth. But do we really need backend and database ?

Lots of vibe coder are not technical to handle server and database setup, https, ngnix….etc. And i think the current cloud services are built for scalability and still require infrastructure knowledge to setup and management , by eliminating backend and database we can make vibe coding more easy and enable more non technical users to deploy their project to live.

We had a fun one on a mobile banking support project. Not fun at the time, obviously.

About 40 minutes after a release, transfers started slowing down. Then came the 502s. It was payday too, so traffic was already higher than normal.

First reaction was to restart the services.

Bad call.

Every restart dropped the warm database connections, and the load spiked again. We were basically making things worse while trying to fix them.

Turned out the release had changed the DB connection pool settings. Once we found that in the deployment logs and rolled back, things settled down within a few minutes.

The other mistake was communication. The engineer working on the incident was also trying to answer questions from the bank's operations team, which had support lines filling up.

We changed that afterward. One person handles the incident, another handles updates. Even if the update is just "still investigating."

Curious if anyone else has had a seemingly harmless recovery step make an outage worse.

​

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a project idea that solves a genuine problem faced by developers, engineering teams, or businesses.

I want to build something beyond a standard CRUD application, with a strong focus on backend engineering.

I'm interested in exploring areas such as:

- API design and reliability

- Distributed systems and event-driven architecture

- Database performance and data consistency

- Developer productivity tools

- Monitoring, debugging, and automation

I'd particularly appreciate suggestions based on problems you've personally experienced at work or in your own projects.

Three questions:

1. What repetitive or frustrating technical problem do you face regularly?

2. What tool or workflow do you wish existed, or worked better?

3. If someone built a small, reliable solution to this problem, would you actually use it?

I'm open to using Java or another language if the problem calls for it.

Thanks!

With the recent PHP security vulnerability making headlines, I'm wondering how much impact this could have on the PHP job market in the long run.

I'm currently working as a PHP developer, and with all the AI disruption already happening in IT, news like this makes me question the future of the tech stack even more.

Could this push companies towards other technologies, or is it just another security issue that will eventually get patched and forgotten?

Would love to hear from experienced PHP developers and people involved in hiring. Are you seeing any changes in demand for PHP developers? Is it still worth investing in PHP/Laravel, or should developers seriously start preparing to switch stacks?

Hi my goal is to learn ml but i also want to learn backend with basics of frontend
I want suggestion from where i can learn good backend with frontend basics thanks
Also if there are stacks for backend also, please suggest(dont know anything about it yet)
Thanks

A small calculation that changed how I look at timeouts. Take a request that has to answer the user in 3 seconds.

Step 1. Your service calls another service, and you’ve set a 2-second timeout on that call. That looks safe, since 2 is less than 3.

Step 2. The call is wrapped in a retry, with up to 2 retries after the first attempt. A timed-out attempt is retried.

Step 3. Worst case, all three attempts time out:

worst case = timeout × (retries + 1)
           = 2s × (2 + 1)
           = 6s

The user’s budget was 3 seconds. In the worst case you spend twice that waiting on one dependency, and you haven’t started counting the rest of the request yet.

Step 4. Now add a second dependency with the same settings. If both are called one after the other and both are slow, the worst case is 12 seconds. Each setting looked reasonable on its own, and the total is nowhere near the budget.

A few things this seems to imply:

• timeouts and retries have to be chosen together, from the outside in: start with the budget the caller gave you, then divide it
• a retry is only useful if there’s time left to make it, so a deadline that is passed along and checked before each attempt works better than a fixed timeout per call (I believe gRPC propagates deadlines like this, but check your stack)
• retrying a call that’s already slow because the dependency is overloaded makes it worse. A small cap on retries, with a bit of random delay between them, helps avoid everyone hammering it at once
• retries are only safe for operations that can be repeated, so idempotency comes first

One more thing to check is what your HTTP client does by default. As far as I know, several common Java clients have no timeout at all unless you set one, which means the “worst case” can be unbounded. I’d look this up for the exact client and version you use, since defaults vary.

What I’m not sure about is how to split a budget across calls that run in parallel versus in sequence, and whether people set it by hand or compute it somewhere central.

How do you handle it in your services? Do you have a standard timeout and retry policy, or does each call get decided where it’s written?