I released The Conscious Node, a book about building Node.js backends that hold up in production. It’s been on my website for a while, and I never announced it here. That’s an odd miss, because you’re the readers I wrote it for.
So this is the proper announcement.
What’s inside
157 tips across 10 chapters, about 250 pages. Every tip has the same four parts: the context, the code to avoid, the code to prefer, and a one-line takeaway.
Application structure and architecture
Code design and patterns
Error handling and logging
Security
Testing
API design (REST and GraphQL)
Database and data
Performance and production
Tooling
The 10 Rules of Senior Node
One tip: the retry that charges your customer twice
A client sends “create order”. The server creates the order, but the response gets lost on the way back. The client retries, and now the customer has two orders.
Retried GETs are harmless. Retried POSTs aren’t, unless the endpoint is idempotent. Tip 6.13 fixes it with an Idempotency-Key header: the client sends a unique key with the write, and the server uses that key to recognize a retry instead of creating a second order.
That’s one tip. The other 156 work the same way.
Two ways to get it
Just the Book, $29. PDF, MOBI and EPUB, with lifetime updates.
The Complete Package, $59. The book plus three companion repos: book-examples runs every tip as an Avoid/Prefer demo, case-studies has 6 deep-dive services, and express-boilerplate is a production Express 5 starter. Each repo ships with CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md and .cursorrules, so Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot write code that follows the book.
Both come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Not sure yet? Read the free sample first
The first three tips of Chapter 1 are free, as a PDF and EPUB: structure the app in modules, start with a modular monolith, and split routes, services and repositories into layers. They look basic. Chapter 1 is where most Node services go wrong, before the first endpoint ships.
Read them. If the way the book thinks clicks for you, you’ll know in ten minutes.
One favor
If you know a backend engineer who’d get something out of this, forward them this email or send them the link.
Thanks for reading,
Petar