dragonked2/alphacode/backend-dev

Backend Development Skill Suite

Overview

This skill provides a complete backend development methodology following the full lifecycle:

Requirements → Architecture → Implementation → Testing → Deployment → Monitoring

When to Use

• Building RESTful or GraphQL APIs
• Designing microservices or monolithic backends
• Implementing authentication/authorization systems
• Database schema design and optimization
• Caching strategy implementation
• API security hardening
• Production deployment and monitoring

Lifecycle Phases

Phase 1: Requirements & Architecture

1. Define API contract first — Write OpenAPI/Swagger spec before code
2. Choose technology stack — Match to team expertise and project needs
3. Design data model — ERD before implementation
4. Plan authentication — JWT, OAuth2, sessions based on use case
5. Identify integration points — Third-party APIs, message queues, caches

Phase 2: Implementation

1. Project structure — Follow language-specific conventions
2. Error handling — Structured errors from day one
3. Validation — Input validation at API boundary
4. Logging — Structured, correlation IDs, log levels
5. Security — Auth middleware, rate limiting, CORS, input sanitization

Phase 3: Testing

1. Unit tests — Business logic, utilities, helpers
2. Integration tests — API endpoints, database operations
3. Contract tests — API spec compliance
4. Load tests — Performance baseline
5. Security tests — OWASP Top 10 checklist

Phase 4: Deployment

1. Docker — Multi-stage builds, minimal images
2. CI/CD — Automated testing, linting, building
3. Configuration — Environment variables, secrets management
4. Health checks — Liveness and readiness probes
5. Graceful shutdown — Handle SIGTERM, drain connections

Phase 5: Monitoring

1. Metrics — Request rate, error rate, latency (RED method)
2. Logging — Centralized, searchable, structured
3. Tracing — Distributed tracing across services
4. Alerting — On error spikes, latency degradation
5. Dashboards — Operational visibility

Core Principles

• Defense in depth — Never trust a single layer
• Fail fast, fail safe — Validate early, handle errors gracefully
• Observability by default — Log, trace, and measure everything
• Stateless where possible — Horizontal scalability
• Security is not optional — Every endpoint must be secured

Technology Sub-Skills

Select the appropriate sub-skill based on your stack:

Checklist

• [ ] API contract defined (OpenAPI spec)
• [ ] Authentication strategy chosen and implemented
• [ ] Database schema designed and migrated
• [ ] Input validation on all endpoints
• [ ] Error handling with proper HTTP status codes
• [ ] Rate limiting implemented
• [ ] Structured logging with correlation IDs
• [ ] Health check endpoint
• [ ] Graceful shutdown handling
• [ ] Unit and integration tests written
• [ ] Docker build working
• [ ] CI/CD pipeline configured
• [ ] Monitoring and alerting in place