Course overview

A practical path from application architecture to secure APIs, persistence, testing, deployment, and production operations.

Who this course is for

Developers who can build a basic frontend or API and want to learn how to make a complete application testable, secure, deployable, and supportable in production.

Learning outcomes

Design layered applications with clear responsibilities.
Define stable REST contracts and consistent error behavior.
Model data, apply migrations, and enforce authorization.
Test business rules and integrations at appropriate levels.
Build CI pipelines and plan safe deployments.
Diagnose incidents with useful, privacy-aware observability.

Curriculum

Module 1: Architecture & API contracts

Designing a Production-Ready Full-Stack App — Define boundaries between UI, API, domain logic, and persistence.
API Contracts, Validation & Error Handling — Build predictable REST APIs with explicit contracts and safe error responses.

Module 2: Data, testing & security

Data Modeling, Migrations & Authentication — Design durable schemas and secure session boundaries.
Testing Pyramid & Integration Testing — Test business rules, HTTP contracts, and database behavior at the right boundaries.

Module 3: Delivery & operations

CI, Build Reproducibility & Deployment — Automate checks and make each deployment traceable and reversible.
Logging, Monitoring & Incident Readiness — Diagnose production failures without leaking user data.

How to study

Read each lesson and write down the core idea in your own words.
Complete the practical assignment before reading the suggested solution.
Keep the work in a small repository with a README and reproducible commands.
Revisit any lesson where you cannot explain a trade-off or failure mode.
Finish the capstone with tests, documentation, and a short retrospective.

Capstone

Build a small project-management application with a frontend, validated API, relational data model, authorization, automated tests, CI checks, deployment notes, structured logs, and an incident runbook.

Prerequisites

Basic programming, HTTP, Git, and introductory SQL. The examples are framework-neutral; adapt them to your preferred stack.