software-backend
Installation
SKILL.md
Software Backend Engineering
Use this skill for backend service implementation and review: API boundaries, auth, data access, jobs, caching, observability, and production hardening. If the main question is platform selection, system topology, or API-contract design without implementation, hand off early.
Quick Reference
| Need | Default Direction |
|---|---|
| Public HTTP API | REST with explicit contracts and timeouts |
| Internal TS monorepo API | tRPC when end-to-end type safety matters |
| High-throughput internal RPC | Connect by default; plain gRPC only when you don't need browser/gRPC-Web compatibility |
| Complex client-shaped reads | GraphQL |
| Relational data | PostgreSQL with migrations and pooling |
| Background work | Queue plus idempotent handlers and DLQ policy |
| Browser auth | OIDC (authorization code with PKCE) plus httpOnly cookies |
| Service auth | prefer workload identity (cloud IAM, SPIFFE) over long-lived static credentials where the platform provides it; short-lived tokens or signed service credentials when it isn't available (multi-cloud, third-party, legacy) |
| Caching | explicit TTLs and invalidation rules |
| Observability | correlation IDs, traces, structured logs, saturation metrics |