Internal standard · 2026
Backend Conventions Kit
Rules, traps and checklists for starting a backend
What it is
A portable folder you copy into a new backend on day one. Every rule in it was paid for once already, by a bug that shipped. The point of copying it is that you do not pay for them again.
How it works
- 30 concern guides, one per cross-cutting topic: permissions, migrations, caching, tenancy and scoping, dates and timezones, money and quantities, state machines, background jobs, audit logging, pagination, rate limiting, seeding, notifications, import and export, analytics, testing and the frontend contract.
- A day-one checklist of roughly twenty decisions that are cheap now and very expensive in month six.
- One owner per rule. A cross-cutting rule is written in full in exactly one place and appears everywhere else as a one-line summary with a link, so it cannot drift into eight disagreeing copies.
- Every document carries a date stamp, and check_docs.py fails the commit when a link dies or a document goes stale. A document that lies is worse than no document.
What I took from it
The clearest thing I have written. It is what I would hand a new engineer before they open the code.