Backend for Applications - Good Practices for Startups

Startups operate under extreme uncertainty. You don't know if the product will be successful, but you need to launch it to find out. In this scenario, the backend "best practice" is not the most robust or scalable, it is the most agile.

Building the backend of a startup is the art of choosing smart shortcuts (Conscious Technical Debt) that enable speed without making the future unfeasible.

1. Monolith First

Forget microservices. Serious. The overhead of managing 10 different services, 10 deployments, networks and distributed logs will kill your productivity.

The Practice: Make a single backend (Monolith) well organized. It's easier to test, deploy and understand. If one day you become Uber, you break down into microservices.

2. Choose “Boring” Technologies

Don't use the [2] new database that came out last week on Hacker News. Use what the team knows and what the community has.

Languages: Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP.
Database: PostgreSQL or MySQL. If you have a problem in Postgres, someone on StackOverflow already had this problem in 2012 and the answer is there.

3. Infrastructure as a Service (PaaS)

Don't waste time configuring Linux server, firewall and load balancer on AWS EC2. Use platforms like Heroku, Render or Vercel. They cost a little more, but you connect GitHub and the deployment happens magically. Your engineer's time is more expensive than the difference in your cloud bill.

4. Standard Rest API

Don't invent API fads. Follow the REST pattern. Use HTTP verbs correctly (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). Use status codes (200, 404, 500). This makes life easier for those who will consume the API (the App developer) and for those who will maintain it afterwards.

5. Automatic Documentation

No one will stop to write a PDF of documentation. Use tools like Swagger (OpenAPI) that read your code and generate an API documentation page automatically. This avoids the "Hey, what's the login endpoint again?" on Slack every 5 minutes.

Conclusion

For a startup, code is not an asset; it is a cost. The asset is the product running in the user's hand. Your backend must be simple, functional and easy to change. Technical perfection is the enemy of rapid innovation.