FastAPI is the framework I wish I had when I started writing backends. It's small, modern, and gets out of the way.

In this post we'll build a tiny API for managing notes — three endpoints, Pydantic models, and a clean project structure that will scale far past a tutorial.

Start with a virtual environment and install the essentials:

pip install fastapi uvicorn[standard]

Then sketch the smallest useful app:

from fastapi import FastAPI
from pydantic import BaseModel

app = FastAPI()

class Note(BaseModel):
    title: str
    body: str

@app.post('/notes')
def create_note(note: Note):
    return {'ok': True, 'note': note}

Run it with `uvicorn main:app --reload` and visit `/docs` — interactive API docs for free. That single moment is what made me fall in love with FastAPI.