Deep dives into designing scalable, reliable systems — URL shorteners, chat apps, rate limiters, caching, and more.
10 articles
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Deep dive into rate limiting algorithms — token bucket, sliding window, leaky bucket — with distributed Redis implementations and patterns for every layer of your stack.
A complete walkthrough of designing a URL shortener service — covering hashing strategies, database schema, caching, analytics, and scaling to billions of redirects.