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Deep dives into designing scalable, reliable systems — URL shorteners, chat apps, rate limiters, caching, and more.
16 articles
A practical guide to the design decisions that determine whether an event-driven system stays maintainable or quietly rots — delivery guarantees, ordering, idempotency, schema evolution, and the outbox.
Walk through the architecture of a production search system — inverted indexes, BM25 ranking, vector embeddings, and hybrid retrieval for 50M documents at 10K QPS.
A system design deep dive into building a notification platform that handles push, email, SMS, and in-app notifications at scale — covering architecture, priority queues, fan-out strategies, rate limiting, and delivery tracking.
Retrieval-augmented generation demos look great. Production RAG is a different engineering problem — chunking, hybrid retrieval, reranking, evaluation, and the failure modes nobody mentions at conferences.
A deep dive into the three dominant API paradigms — REST, GraphQL, and gRPC — covering design principles, pagination strategies, versioning, authentication patterns, and practical guidance on choosing the right one for your system.
A comprehensive guide to event-driven architecture — covering pub/sub, event sourcing, CQRS, saga patterns, message broker trade-offs, and the hard lessons teams learn in production.
A practical comparison of the vector databases people actually deploy in 2026 — and an honest look at when a vector database is the wrong tool for the job.
A deep dive into caching patterns that power the world's fastest systems — from cache-aside and write-through to multi-level architectures, stampede prevention, and real-world eviction strategies at scale.
Idempotency keys are what separate a payment system that double-charges during a retry from one that doesn't. The mechanism looks simple and has five subtle failure modes you need to know about.
Cut through the hype and understand when a monolith, modular monolith, or microservices architecture is the right fit. Covers service boundaries, data ownership, communication patterns, and practical migration strategies.
Understand how database indexes work under the hood, from B+ tree internals to composite index design. Learn to read EXPLAIN plans, avoid common anti-patterns, and make informed trade-offs between read performance and write amplification.
LLM-powered pipelines break in the same ways old monoliths did — when you stack synchronous calls. Queues, events, and the patterns that make a six-step AI pipeline survive a partial outage.
A complete system design walkthrough for building real-time chat at scale — covering WebSocket management, message delivery guarantees, presence systems, group chat fan-out, and end-to-end encryption.
A deep dive into the CAP theorem — what it really means for distributed systems, why you can only pick two guarantees, and how real databases like Cassandra, MongoDB, and DynamoDB make their trade-offs.
Three patterns for multi-tenant data isolation in SaaS, the trade-offs between cost, blast radius, and compliance, and a migration path from one to another when you outgrow your first choice.
A complete walkthrough of designing a URL shortener service — covering hashing strategies, database schema, caching, analytics, and scaling to billions of redirects.
