I’ve recently noticed a bit of popularity of the question from the subject – “Node.js: is frontend or backend?”. That made me think about what is obvious for someone may be not that obvious for someone else. The question is probably coming from people beginning their journey in computer science (CS) space. And most of…
Why do we use Node.js in our backend?
Ryan Dahl kicked off work on Node.js in 2009 on top of two years of research related to server-side web components. The journey of the runtime wasn’t a smooth ride at all but as of today the major component of its semantic versioning hit 18. The revolutionary premise of Node.js was “server-side JavaScript” because since…
Backend for Frontend – What is it?
Backend for Frontend design pattern – BFF for short while it’s definitely not “Best Friends Forever” ? – seems to get some hype lately. It’s nowhere a new thing: one of the first mentions were by SoundCloud guys back in 2015. Basically it’s a specialized case of a more generic API Gateway pattern. Let’s figure…
Scalable Backend Secret Sauce
There’s an implementation principle of a scalable backend system which I find among the most important ones. It’s about minimization of compute resources footprint of a request handler for every possible request. This principle isn’t only applicable to handlers in request/response scenarios, e.g. REST or GraphQL APIs. For a session-based handler like a websocket handler…