Feb 28 · 4 min read · Lights Out, And Away We Go (Again) By the time Sunday rolls around in a Grand Prix weekend, the garages are quiet, the setup is locked in, and nobody is allowed to touch anything unless it’s absolutel
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Feb 11 · 4 min read · Welcome back to our System Design Series. If you’ve ever built an application that started small but suddenly gained a surge of traffic, you’ve likely faced the "Scaling Wall." Your server is gasping for air, latency is spiking, and your users are se...
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Jan 23 · 5 min read · Performance is the efficiency of a single request; Scalability is the system’s ability to maintain that efficiency as volume increases. It is a common mistake to conflate performance and scalability. A server that responds in 10ms is performant. A sy...
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Dec 29, 2025 · 9 min read · If you have a single road, the 100 cars might take 5 minutes on average to cross the road. The throughput here is 20 cars/minute and latency is 5 minutes. But if you have 5 roads, they might take only 2 minutes on average. So the throughput increased...
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Dec 8, 2025 · 4 min read · Well, you have come a long way in your DevOps journey. When your application gets more requests than usual, the server running your application can't handle the load. Traditionally, there are two ways to scale up your server, as you just saw in the b...
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Nov 12, 2025 · 18 min read · The system design interview. For many senior backend engineers, architects, and engineering leads, it is a familiar gauntlet, often perceived as a test of pattern recognition. Yet, I have observed countless times how quickly these discussions can dev...
Join discussionSep 5, 2025 · 8 min read · Introduction The topics and theories of our favorite subject, system design, are inspired by the famous book "System Design Interview" by Alex Xu. This article aims to build the foundation of system design, covering basic concepts that will be used a...
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Aug 8, 2025 · 3 min read · Imagine it’s Friday night and you’re craving Domino’s Pizza. You place an order online, but the website says the estimated delivery time is 2 hours. Why? Because there’s a massive rush — and only one outlet is handling all the orders in your city. No...
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Jul 11, 2025 · 15 min read · We've all been there. The late-night pager duty, the frantic Slack messages, the dashboard painted in an alarming shade of red. Your beautifully crafted application, once nimble and responsive, is now buckling under the weight of its own success. Req...
Join discussionJul 2, 2025 · 22 min read · Database Sharding Strategies and Implementation: A Deep Dive for Senior Engineers The Unyielding Pressure of Scale: When Your Database Becomes the Bottleneck Imagine a rapidly growing e-commerce platform, processing millions of transactions daily. Or...
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