All 57 articles, sorted alphabetically
Coding Assistants: How DeepSeek-V3 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet Became the New Standard for Software Engineering
Read article →LoRA and QLoRA: Fine-tuning a Trillion-Parameter Model on a Single Home GPU
Read article →Context Connect: A Word Context Game
Context Connect: A Word Context Game
Read article →A/B experimentation platform architecture
Deep-dive on building an A/B testing platform: deterministic salted assignment, exposure logging at the call site, the exposure-to-event join, a stats…
Read article →Ansible Introduction
What Ansible is, how it configures servers via SSH without agents, and its YAML playbook model.
Read article →Argo CD Introduction
What Argo CD is, how GitOps works, and why declarative Git-driven K8s deployment is the modern standard.
Read article →Batch Processing Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of batch processing: trigger, orchestrator, DAG, workers, idempotency, retry, backfill, quality gates, observability, SLA.
Read article →Change Data Capture Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of CDC architecture: source DB replication log, connector, Kafka topic, sinks, exactly-once, snapshotting, schema evolution.
Read article →Real-time chat messaging architecture
Deep-dive on building a real-time chat system: persistent-connection gateways, a write path that persists and sequences before acknowledging, fan-out …
Read article →CI/CD
How CI/CD automates build, test, and deployment for fast, reliable software delivery.
Read article →Dead-letter queues -- where failed messages go to be dealt with
Deep-dive on dead-letter queues (DLQs): the poison-message problem, sidelining after max retries, retry-then-dead-letter, preserving context (error/at…
Read article →DevOps Introduction
What DevOps is (culture as much as tools) and the practices that speed up software delivery.
Read article →Distributed counter architecture
Deep-dive on distributed counters: sharding to eliminate write contention, local aggregation and atomic adds, cached rollups for hot reads, HyperLogLo…
Read article →Distributed lock architecture
Deep-dive on distributed locking: a consensus-backed lock service granting a lease with a TTL that survives crashes, renewal heartbeats that extend it…
Read article →Docker Introduction
What Docker is, how containers differ from VMs, and the image + runtime model.
Read article →Email delivery architecture
Deep-dive on email delivery: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, dedicated IPs + warm-up, bounce + complaint handling, reputation monitoring.
Read article →Feature flag architecture
Deep-dive on feature flags: SDK, targeting rules, kill switch, rollout stages, A/B, audit, cleanup, tech-debt tracking.
Read article →Geo proximity search architecture
Deep-dive on nearest-neighbour search: why B-trees cannot index 2D, space-filling curves from geohash to S2 Hilbert ordering, quadtree adaptivity, the…
Read article →Git Branching Strategies
The main Git branching strategies and how to choose based on team and release model.
Read article →Helm Introduction
What Helm is, how charts package Kubernetes manifests, and how to use them.
Read article →Idempotency keys
Deep-dive on idempotency keys: client key generation and reuse, the idempotency store and first-vs-replay logic, concurrency locking, result caching, …
Read article →Infrastructure as Code
How IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) manages infrastructure declaratively in code.
Read article →Inventory reservation architecture
Deep-dive on inventory reservation: the atomic check-and-decrement gate, available = on_hand − reserved, TTL-bounded holds and the reaper, confirm-on-…
Read article →Kubernetes Introduction
What Kubernetes is, its core objects (Pods, Deployments, Services), and why it dominates orchestration.
Read article →Leaderboard architecture
Deep-dive on leaderboards: score events, ranking store, atomic snapshot, fraud detection, filters, tiebreakers, cache, history.
Read article →News feed architecture
Deep-dive on building a social news feed at scale, where the central decision is when to do the work: fan-out on write (push a post id into every foll…
Read article →Notification system architecture
Deep-dive on notification system: router, preferences, template engine, channels, dedupe, throttle + digest, compliance, analytics.
Read article →Object storage architecture
Deep-dive on object storage system design: the flat, immutable key-to-blob model that trades POSIX semantics for exabyte scale, how eleven-nines durab…
Read article →Transactional outbox -- reliable events with database writes
Deep-dive on the transactional outbox pattern: the dual-write problem, the outbox table and atomic same-transaction write, CDC vs polling relays, at-l…
Read article →Payment gateway architecture
Deep-dive on payment gateway architecture: idempotency keys, tokenization vaults and PCI scope, the payment state machine, risk and 3DS, immutable dou…
Read article →Priority queue service architecture
Deep-dive on priority queue services: why priority is a latency promise that only matters under contention, priority classes and ordering stores, the …
Read article →Rate limit system architecture
Deep-dive on rate limit system: token bucket, sliding window, distributed store, client fairness, 429, kill switch, multi-region.
Read article →Recommender architecture
Deep-dive on recommender systems: retrieval, ranking, diversity, cold start, exploration, feedback logging, retraining, A/B.
Read article →Saga Pattern Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of Saga pattern: choreography vs orchestration, steps + compensations, persistent state, idempotency, retries, observability.
Read article →Distributed job scheduler -- running work reliably at scale
Deep-dive on distributed job schedulers: why naive cron doesn't scale or survive failures, scheduling (cron/delays/intervals)…
Read article →Search architecture
Deep-dive on search architecture: indexer, hybrid retrieval, learned ranker, query pipeline, cache, typeahead, personalization, and A/B.
Read article →Terraform Introduction
What Terraform is, HCL basics, and why it dominates multi-cloud infrastructure management.
Read article →Typeahead architecture — FST indexes, precomputed top-k, prefix sharding, and the 100 ms keystroke budget
Deep-dive on autocomplete systems: mining and scoring query logs, compiling FST indexes with per-node top-k, prefix-sharded in-memory serving, edge ca…
Read article →URL shortener architecture
Deep-dive on designing a URL shortener: the read/write skew and immutable mappings, counter+base62 vs KGS vs hashing key generation, cache-fronted red…
Read article →Webhook delivery platform architecture
Deep-dive on webhook delivery systems: durable ingest and subscription fan-out, per-endpoint circuit breakers, jittered exponential backoff, HMAC sign…
Read article →Workflow Orchestration Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of workflow orchestration: definition, scheduler, workers, durable state, task queue, retry, signals, child workflows, version…
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