Engineering notes · Knowledge base
Trade-offs, failure modes, and system design.
Deep dives into backend engineering, distributed data, performance, and the lessons behind production architecture decisions.
Distributed SystemsSystem Design ExamplesiGaming Game DesignSystem Design FundamentalsFeatured deep dives
Long-form explanations of the decisions that shape dependable backend systems.
Why Your New Profile Picture Does Not Immediately Update Everywhere
Changing a profile picture is one write. Making it visible across feeds, search, notifications, caches, and regions is a distributed systems problem.
Engineering High Throughput News Feed Architectures
A news feed looks simple until you have to distribute millions of posts, keep reads fast, handle hot users, and recover cleanly when parts of the system fail. This design explores the decisions that start to matter at scale.
Exactly-Once Is a Lie or at Least Not the Guarantee You Think It Is
Protecting business invariants with idempotency, transactional outbox patterns, retries, and reconciliation.
All engineering notes
Why Your New Profile Picture Does Not Immediately Update Everywhere
Changing a profile picture is one write. Making it visible across feeds, search, notifications, caches, and regions is a distributed systems problem.
Engineering High Throughput News Feed Architectures
A news feed looks simple until you have to distribute millions of posts, keep reads fast, handle hot users, and recover cleanly when parts of the system fail. This design explores the decisions that start to matter at scale.
Exactly-Once Is a Lie or at Least Not the Guarantee You Think It Is
Protecting business invariants with idempotency, transactional outbox patterns, retries, and reconciliation.
Designing a Well-Structured Keno Game: Game Engine, Randomness, and Payouts
A deep dive into designing a Keno game, covering game engine design, secure random draws, randomness principles, and payout calculation strategies.
CAP Theorem and Trade-offs Between Consistency and Availability
Understanding the CAP theorem and its impact on distributed system design, including trade offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.
Replication Strategies: Master-Slave and Master-Master
Learn about replication techniques to increase availability and fault tolerance, including master-slave and master-master replication.
Designing Real-World Systems
Step-by-step guide for designing scalable, high-performance systems including requirements gathering, estimations, and component design.
Architecting a Global URL Shortener at Scale
An in-depth look at distributed ID generation, multi-region redirection latency, and event-driven analytics for high-throughput URL shortening services.
Distributed File Storage: S3 and HDFS Concepts
An overview of distributed file storage systems such as Amazon S3 and HDFS, their architecture, and use cases.