Exploring My First Week at CyberOni: FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Valkey

Starting a new role is always exciting — and my first week at CyberOni was no exception. Rather than spending days passively onboarding, I hit the ground running with hands-on backend development across a modern tech stack.

Building with FastAPI: Beyond the Basics

Although I had used FastAPI in past projects, this week pushed me to apply it at a professional level. I wasn't just going through tutorials — I was enhancing the actual backend services with existing endpoints. My work spanned:

• Structuring routes and organizing modules for scalability

• Implementing async logic and JWT-based authentication

• Using Pydantic for strict request/response schemas

• Handling deployment logic via Docker and Linode

• Integrating a React frontend with the backend API

This experience helped solidify what it means to write clean, maintainable FastAPI code in a team setting, where conventions and structure matter just as much as functionality.

PostgreSQL in Production: From Queries to Architecture

While I had some experience with SQL and PostgreSQL from previous coursework and personal projects, applying it in a real production environment was another level.

I contributed to:

• Designing and extending data models

• Writing performant SQL queries using SQLAlchemy ORM

• Thinking about migrations, indexing, and how data scales over time

It wasn’t just about writing queries — it was also about thinking architecturally: what belongs in the database, what should be cached, and how to model data for real-world applications.

Redis & Valkey: My First Experience with In-Memory Databases

One of the most exciting (and completely new) parts of my week was learning how Redis and Valkey power performance-critical parts of the system.

I worked on:

• Caching API responses to reduce database load

• Implementing rate limiting to protect login endpoints

• Handling graceful fallbacks when the cache is unavailable

This was also my first time exploring Valkey, an open-source fork of Redis. It was interesting to learn the differences between Redis and Valkey — largely for licensing flexibility and community ownership — and the improved performance it offers, thanks to Valkey’s multithreaded I/O handling and modernized core architecture.

Takeaways

This week reinforced the importance of learning by building, not just watching tutorials. Even with prior experience in FastAPI and PostgreSQL, pairing with a senior engineer during onboarding challenged me to think more critically about code quality and real-world application. And diving into Valkey/Redis opened my eyes to how caching can make or break performance at scale.

Excited for what’s ahead.