Backend Engineering — A Manifesto

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        Be BOLD
    
        or be italic
    
        but don’t be plain

        Backend engineering
    
        is the art of
    
        absence.

        Inputs are unreliable.
    
        Time is adversarial.
    
        State must remain consistent.

Good systems are defined by invariants.

∀ x ∈ ℤₙ : validate(x) ⇒ f(x) ∈ ℤₙ

        Every interface has an adversary.
    
        Replay attacks are assumptions violated.
    
        Trust is not implicit. It is derived.

        Complexity does not emerge from features.
    
        It emerges from interaction — between systems,
        assumptions, time, and state.
    
        The role of backend engineering is to make those interactions predictable.

        Most bugs are not logic errors.
    
        They are missing preconditions.
    
        correctness ⇒ constraints + proofs

ABSENCE