Solomon Eseme
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Solomon Eseme
@kaperskyguru.bsky.social
23 followers 15 following 1.4K posts
I help you become a great backend engineer | ceo @Masteringbackend.com
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The mindset:

Don’t ask “what’s broken?”

Ask “what changed?” and “why didn’t we see it sooner?”

Good backend engineers debug; great ones design for visibility.
Tools you should know:

- Prometheus & Grafana for metrics
- OpenTelemetry for tracing
- ELK or Loki for logs
- Datadog, New Relic, or Honeycomb if you’re going managed

But tools are secondary — mindset first.
Why this matters:

At scale, small issues multiply fast.

A single missing index or retry loop can cause cascading failures.

Observability lets you spot issues before users do — and prove you actually fixed them.
Metrics:

Quantify system health.

- Request rate
- Error rate
- Latency percentiles

Traces:

Connect the dots across services.

- Where time is spent
- Which service causes slowdowns

Logs:

The details when you zoom in.
Logs do not equal Observability.

Logs help you look back, but observability helps you understand now.

It combines logs, metrics, and traces to give a full picture of what’s happening across your system.

Think of it like a flight dashboard — not a black box recorder.
You can’t scale what you can’t see.

Many backend engineers spend months optimizing queries or rewriting code — when the real issue is invisible.

That’s where observability comes in.

Let’s break down how pros use it to debug, scale, and sleep better at night ↓
The good news?

You can learn that mindset by building structured, real backend projects.

Not toy projects, but real-world systems with APIs, databases, and deployments.

That’s how you bridge the gap.
So if you’ve been learning Python and still feel stuck...
You’re not broken — your approach is.

You’ve mastered the language, but not the backend mindset.

That’s the missing link between you and your first backend job.
That’s why backend engineering feels intimidating.

It forces you to stop thinking in features and start thinking in flows — how every request travels through your system.

It’s a new way of seeing code — and it changes everything.
You build an API that slows down under load.

- A Python learner blames the language.
- A backend engineer checks database indexing, caching, and query optimization, etc.

See the mindset shift? It’s not about code — it’s about systems.
To think like a backend engineer, u must understand

- Databases: schemas, transactions, performance
- APIs: authentication, pagination, caching
- Servers: concurrency, load balancing
- DevOps: CI/CD, containerization, monitoring

Each layer matters. Ignore one & ur system breaks
- How does data flow through your app?
- Why did you choose REST over GraphQL?
- Why use PostgreSQL instead of MongoDB?

Those are interview questions — and real-world ones.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

You can’t learn that from coding tutorials alone.

They teach you the “what.”

But backend engineering is about the “how” and “why.”

Examples:
A backend engineer is part developer, part architect, part problem solver.

You don’t just build endpoints — you build systems that:

- Handle scale
- Manage security
- Stay online under stress
- Integrate with other services

That’s what real backend jobs demand.
Let’s be honest — Python is easy to start, but hard to master in the backend world.

Anyone can write:

```
print("Hello World")

```

But not everyone can design an API that handles 100k users without breaking.

That’s the gap.
You can know every Python keyword, pass every online quiz, and still fail backend interviews.

Why?

Because companies don’t hire Python coders, they hire backend engineers.

Here’s what separates them 🧵
4. The formula:

Build small Python APIs

- Connect databases
- Add authentication
- Deploy live
- Repeat daily

After 30 projects, you’ll think like an engineer — not a tutorial follower.
3. The way out

Stop watching. Start shipping.

- Every time you hit a bug, Google it.
- Every time you get stuck, debug it.
- Every time you finish something, document it.

That’s how real backend engineers learn.
2. Why did it happen

Your brain loves short-term wins.

Finishing a tutorial feels like progress, but it doesn’t teach you real problem-solving.

Building from scratch does.
1. What is Tutorial Hell?

It’s when you:

- Follow endless YouTube videos
- Copy code without understanding
- Never finish personal projects
- Feel productive but never progress

You’re learning passively — not actively.
If you’ve been “learning Backend” for months but still can’t build anything on your own...

You’re not bad at coding —

You’re stuck in Tutorial Hell. 🧵
If you love diving into backend fundamentals like this — performance, scalability, caching, and system design.

You’ll enjoy Backend Quizzes → quizzes.masteringbackend.com

It’s a free platform to test how well you really understand backend engineering principles.
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