The server side of a product — REST APIs, database design and the third-party integrations that hold everything together. Built in Python, on FastAPI, Django or Flask.
An API is a contract, and most backend problems are contract problems: an endpoint that returns three different shapes, an authorisation check that lives only in the user interface, a database that was never indexed for the query the business actually runs. We start with the contract — resources, auth, versioning, error format and schema — agree it in writing, and only then write code. That order is what makes a backend something a second team can build against without a walkthrough, and what makes changing it two years later a normal piece of work rather than a project. Where a system is already slow or already old, we measure before we change anything and fix the cause rather than the symptom.
The specifics, rather than the adjectives.
Versioned, documented endpoints with consistent error handling, pagination and authentication — designed so your mobile team, a partner or your own front end can integrate without a walkthrough and without guessing what a field means.
The smallest backend that proves the product: accounts, the core entities, the two or three endpoints that carry the business, deployed somewhere real. Enough to put in front of users and learn from, without paying for infrastructure you have not earned yet.
Schema design in PostgreSQL, MySQL or MongoDB — including which of them you should actually be using, which is usually decided by the shape of your data and your reporting needs rather than by fashion. Migrations and indexes planned from the start, because retrofitting them is where the pain lives.
Payments, messaging, accounting, logistics, government portals, and the internal system somebody else wrote. Including the unglamorous parts that decide reliability: retries, idempotency, webhook signature verification, rate limits, and a defined behaviour for when the other side is down.
Finding out what is genuinely slow before changing anything — slow queries, missing indexes, N+1 fetches, blocking calls in the request path — then fixing the cause instead of putting a cache in front of the symptom.
Old Python brought onto a current version with dependencies that still work, dead code removed and tests around the parts that carry value, so the upgrade is not a leap of faith. Done incrementally with the system running throughout, because a big-bang rewrite is how working software becomes a stalled project.
Input validation, parameterised queries, hashed credentials, secrets kept out of the repository, and an authorisation check on every endpoint rather than only in the user interface. The OWASP API risks reviewed before launch, not after an incident.
Pytest coverage of the rules that carry money or permissions, plus integration tests against a real database. Enough that refactoring becomes a routine afternoon rather than an event everybody dreads, and enough to catch the regression before a customer does.
A concrete list of outputs. If something here is not relevant to your project, it comes out of the scope and the price — we would rather agree that in writing now.
Five steps. You always know which one you are in.
Resources, authentication, versioning, error shapes and the database schema — written down and agreed before code. Disagreeing with a document is cheap; disagreeing with a finished API is not.
A single vertical slice end to end: authentication, one entity, one endpoint, real database, deployed. Proves the whole path works before it is replicated ten times.
The remaining endpoints with tests written alongside rather than scheduled for afterwards. Short iterations on a staging environment you can call yourself.
Measured performance work on the queries and endpoints that matter, authorisation reviewed endpoint by endpoint, and a deliberate decision about what happens when a dependency fails.
Documentation, OpenAPI specification, the runbook for common failures, and a walkthrough recording. Your team should be able to change and deploy this without us.
The platforms and frameworks we build, integrate and maintain on. We would rather work in a stack your team can hire for and hand over than pick whatever is interesting this year — and where an existing platform does the job better than custom code, we will say so.
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