The Backend Engineer's Path

A no-fluff curriculum for building production-grade Python backends. Read the full curriculum for the chapter list and what's coming.

How this is published

The book is written as a Markdown source tree under book/src/ and rendered with mdBook. A GitHub Actions workflow builds the book on every push to main and deploys it to GitHub Pages.

One-time setup (do this once)

1. Create a new GitHub repo (e.g., backend-engineer-path). Public is fine.
2. Push this folder to it:

   cd "Backend Engineer"
   git init
   git add .
   git commit -m "initial: curriculum + chapter 1"
   git branch -M main
   git remote add origin git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/backend-engineer-path.git
   git push -u origin main

3. Enable GitHub Pages: in the repo, go to Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source: GitHub Actions.
4. The first push triggers .github/workflows/deploy.yml. After ~1 minute, your book is live at https://YOUR_USERNAME.github.io/backend-engineer-path/.

Reading locally (optional)

If you want to preview before pushing:

# macOS
brew install mdbook mdbook-mermaid
# Linux
cargo install mdbook mdbook-mermaid

cd book
mdbook-mermaid install .
mdbook serve --open

How chapters get added

Each new chapter ships as a follow-up Cowork session. The flow is:

1. Open a new chat: "Continue the backend book — write Chapter 2."
2. Claude writes the chapter into book/src/chXX-*.md, replacing the stub.
3. You commit and push. GitHub Actions deploys.

Tracking: chapter status lives in the Cowork task list (Tasks tab). Stubs are in place for every chapter so the book builds cleanly even before they're written.

Folder structure

Backend Engineer/
├── README.md               # this file
├── curriculum.md           # the master plan
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/
│       └── deploy.yml      # auto-publish on push to main
└── book/
    ├── book.toml           # mdBook config
    └── src/
        ├── SUMMARY.md      # table of contents
        ├── introduction.md
        ├── curriculum.md
        ├── ch01-*.md       # written chapters
        └── ch02-*.md ...   # stubs, filled in over time