🧠 Personal Journal for Backend Development

Welcome to my personal backend development journal! 🚀 This repository is a collection of mini backend projects, each built with TypeScript, Express, and other helpful tools like Zod, UUID, ts-node, Drizzle ORM, and more.

The purpose of this repo is to learn, practice, and document important backend concepts including:

• Error handling
• Input validation
• CRUD operations
• Middleware
• Authentication & Authorization
• Password reset flows
• Rate limiting & security
• Testing
• Dockerization
• Deployment

Each project is located in its own folder under the src directory and includes documentation or comments explaining the thought process and what was learned.

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📁 Projects

📦 error-handling

A simple CRUD API for managing books with custom error handling using Zod and Express.

• Demonstrates:

  • Basic Express setup with TypeScript
  • Using Zod for input validation
  • UUID generation for IDs
  • Centralized error responses
  • Clean code separation and use of interfaces

Technologies Used:

• Node.js, TypeScript, Express, Zod, UUID, TSX

Steps to Run:

1. Install dependencies:

   npm install

2. Run development server:

   npm run dev

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📦 authentication

A complete authentication system with role-based access, JWT tokens, refresh tokens, and password reset functionality.

• Demonstrates:

  • User registration and login
  • Password hashing with bcrypt
  • JWT-based authentication and token refresh
  • Role-based access control (RBAC)
  • Rate limiting for security (login, registration, password reset)
  • Password reset flow (with Postmark email support)
  • Middleware for authentication, authorization, and validation
  • Integration with Drizzle ORM and Neon serverless database
  • Logging with Winston
  • Validation with Zod schemas

Technologies Used:

• Node.js
• TypeScript
• Express
• Zod – Schema validation
• JWT – Authentication tokens
• Bcrypt – Password hashing
• Postmark – Email sending
• Express-rate-limit – Security
• Drizzle ORM – Database modeling
• Neon (Postgres serverless)
• Winston – Logging
• TSX / ts-node – For running TypeScript

Steps to Run:

1. Install dependencies:

   npm install

2. Copy the example environment variables:

   cp .env.example .env

   Then fill in the values (Neon DB URL, JWT secret, Postmark token, verified From email, APP URL, etc.).

3. Push migrations and generate schema with Drizzle:

   npm run db:push
   npm run db:generate

4. Run the development server:

   npm run dev

Learning Milestones Achieved:

• Implemented secure authentication flow with JWT
• Role-based access control (RBAC)
• Password reset flows with tokens
• Rate limiting for key endpoints
• Centralized error handling
• Integration with serverless database (Neon) and Drizzle ORM