Backend & APIs — Services Built to Stay Up

My backend philosophy is boring on purpose: clear contracts, explicit failure, and services that restart themselves without drama. The exciting part is what the services enable — free-tier AI infrastructure, proxy panels serving real users, bridges that turn web accounts into APIs.

Stacks I ship with

Stack	Sweet spot
Python — FastAPI / Django	APIs, agents, async I/O bridges (GhostBrain, Hermes).
Go — Gin / stdlib	Single-binary services and CLIs (NetPilot, OmniRouter).
PHP — Laravel	Full products with auth, queues and admin panels.
C# — ASP.NET	Enterprise-style services and desktop backends.
Node — Express / Fastify	Edge Workers, real-time glue, rapid prototypes.

Non-negotiables

• Health endpoints on anything long-running — my own tooling (NetPilot) monitors them.
• Graceful degradation — a dead upstream must degrade features, never take the process down.
• Structured logs from day one, because debugging by vibes does not scale past 2 AM.
• Contract tests for anything another system depends on — including agents.

The pattern across my projects: the free-api bridges handle hostile, rate-limited upstreams; the panels handle multi-user state; the routers handle failure between them. Same principles, different pressure points.