// backend engineering pathway
Twelve labs that feel like backend engineering, not puzzle practice.
The first pathway teaches HTTP internals, concurrency, database diagnosis, caching, queues, retries, pprof, and failure handling through build labs and production-style debug labs.
Start with two free labsv0 mix
12
Labs
6
Debug
6
Build
40+
Concepts
// the roadmap
Four pathways. One production engineer.
Subscribe once. Every pathway unlocks as it ships. Each one is twelve labs built around real incidents — not language tutorials.
Go Backend Production Engineering
Twelve production incidents and the systems behind them — HTTP framing, N+1 queries, Redis OOM, retry storms, goroutine leaks, write-through caches. Real services, real failures, scored on more than 'did it pass.'
- 01Build
Build a real HTTP server
Sockets, request parsing, routing. No net/http allowed.
- 02Debug
REST API returns 500s under concurrency
Logs are panicking. Find the data race.
- 03Build
LRU cache, 5M ops/sec
O(1) get/put. Hit the perf target on a single core.
- 04Debug
Checkout p99: 80ms → 2.3s
Cache TTL expired and the dashboard lit up. Why?
- 05Build
Token-bucket rate limiter
Per-key buckets. Survive the included DDoS sim.
- 06Debug
Postgres CPU pegged at 100%
5M-row table. EXPLAIN ANALYZE is your friend.
- 07Build
Redis-backed job queue
At-least-once. Idempotency. Visibility timeouts.
- 08Debug
Redis memory exploding
OOM command not allowed. Find the unbounded growth.
- 09Build
Circuit breaker on a flaky downstream
Fraud-check melts checkout. Build the state machine that fails fast.
- 10Debug
Cascading retry storm
Service B is degrading. Service A is making it worse.
- 11Debug
Goroutine leak
Memory creeps. pprof shows 50k stuck goroutines.
- 12Build
Write-through cache
Stay consistent under Postgres and Redis failure.
- Every lab graded on correctness, latency, memory