Python API Engineering

Description

Every application you have built in this path has run on your own computer, for you alone. This course is where that changes: you build a backend that other programs, a mobile app, a web frontend, a script, can actually call over the network, store data in, and trust to enforce its own rules. It is the natural destination of everything the path taught: clean code, classes, tests, packaging and Git all show up here, doing real work inside a real service.

You design REST APIs the way production teams do, build them with FastAPI, model and query data with SQLAlchemy and real migrations, validate every input with Pydantic, add authentication and roles, test the whole thing against an isolated database, and prepare it to run for real: configuration, logging, health checks and a container.

What changes in your work

• Design: you turn a request into a REST API with clear resources, status codes and a consistent error shape, instead of ad hoc endpoints that grow inconsistently.
• Data: you model relationships with SQLAlchemy, write and apply real migrations, and avoid the N+1 query problem that quietly slows down almost every ORM-backed backend.
• Trust: you validate input before it reaches your logic, authenticate and authorize with hashed passwords and signed tokens, and test endpoints against a fresh, isolated database every time.
• Operations: you configure a service by environment, log and monitor it with liveness and readiness checks, and package it as a container that runs the same way everywhere.

How it is taught

Each lesson starts from a situation at the fictional Maple Street Books, explains the idea with its precise definition, a diagram and a worked example, and then proves it by running real tools: FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, pytest and the actual HTTP requests a client would send, with their real responses shown. Docker and deployment are shown as exact recorded commands and output, so the concepts transfer directly to whichever platform you use later, without needing an account or spending anything.

You work in your own editor and terminal, in a virtual environment, with SQLite so nothing needs installing beyond Python itself. All outputs shown in the lessons were produced by running the code.

The project

You build the Bookshop Backend API for Maple Street Books: a catalog with stock, customers, orders that reduce stock and belong to their owner, staff and customer roles, and everything wired together into one working service. You design the API and its data model, build it in the same layers as a professional codebase, secure it, test it against a real database, containerize it, and finish by documenting it, checking its health endpoints and running a short live walkthrough. A template repository with a full test suite tells you which milestone you have finished, and a complete, tested solution is there to compare with afterwards.

What is included

Lessons on REST and HTTP design, FastAPI, SQL and SQLAlchemy, validation, authentication and authorization, testing APIs, pagination and versioning, rate limits and security, configuration, logging, Docker and deployment, the seed data and practice requests used throughout, a guided capstone with a template repository and a tested solution repository with a Dockerfile, and a short quiz at the end of every module drawn from a larger question bank.

Who it is for

If you have followed this path from your first program to a tested, packaged library, this course is where it all becomes a service. It suits developers ready to build web backends, and data or machine learning practitioners who need to serve their work behind a real API instead of a notebook. This is the last course of the Python Programming path, and it leaves you able to build the kind of backend that real products are made of. Do not stop at scripts that only run for you: enroll now, build the API, and finish with a working, tested, containerized service you can put in front of anyone.