Backend and API Development

At the core of our backend development work is an API layer shared by your website, mobile app and admin panel. Business rules for orders, accounts, stock, bookings or reporting live in this one place, so every client works with the same data and follows the same rules. We build new services from scratch, and we also take over existing backends that have grown hard to maintain and restructure them piece by piece into something healthier.

A lot of backend work is invisible to users. Long-running tasks such as sending email and SMS, generating invoices, building reports or pulling data from external services run in the background through queues, so nobody waits on a spinner. We set up scheduled jobs for nightly batch work and webhook endpoints so other systems can notify yours, and for each of them we define up front how failures are retried.

For API development we usually choose REST: it is easy to reason about, cacheable and works with any client. When a mobile app or a data-heavy dashboard needs many different pieces of data on one screen, GraphQL gives more flexible queries with fewer requests. Either way, we document endpoints with OpenAPI or a schema file and plan versioning from day one, so older app versions on users' phones keep working after an update.

On the language side we use Node.js with TypeScript, and Python. TypeScript catches errors at build time in large codebases and lets the backend share type definitions with the frontend. Python is the better fit for heavy data processing, reporting or anything that relies on machine learning libraries. For storage we use PostgreSQL for relational data and Redis for caching, sessions and job queues.

Database design decides more than anything else how well a backend ages. We model tables and relations around your business rules, add the right indexes for frequent queries and manage schema changes through reversible migrations. When an existing system slows down we work from measurements, not guesses: we read query plans and response times first, find the bottleneck, then fix the query, the index or the caching layer.

We treat authentication and authorisation as separate problems. Who the user is gets verified with JWTs, sessions or OAuth; what they can touch is limited by role and resource based rules. Every input is validated on the server, endpoints are rate limited, and passwords and API keys live in environment variables rather than in the code. Sensitive actions are logged so you can later see who did what and when.

We start by mapping your workflows and the clients that will call the API, then write down the data model and a draft of the endpoints. Development moves in weekly milestones: each one gives you working endpoints on a test environment, so your frontend or mobile team can start integrating without waiting for the whole backend. Critical business rules get automated tests, and every change passes them before it is deployed.

Logging, error tracking and response time monitoring are in place at launch, so problems reach us before they reach your users. On delivery you receive the source code, API documentation and setup notes, and your own team can take it from there. If you prefer, we handle new features, dependency updates and performance work on a monthly maintenance plan after the post-launch support period, and our server management and DevOps service can cover the infrastructure too.