System Design

⏱ 5 min read A distributed file system (DFS) stores data across multiple machines while presenting a unified namespace to clients. Google File System […] Read article

⏱ 5 min read Database replication copies data from one database server to one or more replicas. Replication underpins high availability, horizontal read scaling, Read article

⏱ 6 min read Why Isolation Levels Exist A database must handle many concurrent transactions at once. The naive solution — run one transaction Read article

⏱ 7 min read Why Distributed Systems Need Explicit Patterns In a monolith, a function call either succeeds or throws an exception — the Read article

⏱ 8 min read Counting distinct elements is one of the most common operations in analytics: how many unique visitors hit your site today, Read article

⏱ 9 min read Search typeahead (autocomplete) is one of the most latency-sensitive features in any search product. Users expect suggestions to appear within Read article

⏱ 11 min read What Makes Chat Systems Hard? Chat systems look simple on the surface — send a message, receive a message. The Read article

⏱ 6 min read Real-time leaderboards rank millions of users by score and serve instant rank queries — ranking by score, top-N lists, and Read article

⏱ 6 min read A URL shortener converts a long URL into a compact alias and redirects visitors to the original. Services like bit.ly, Read article

⏱ 9 min read Why Caching Matters Caching is one of the highest-leverage tools in system design. A database read can take 1–10 ms; Read article

⏱ 7 min read HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 represent fundamental redesigns of the web’s application protocol, motivated by the performance limitations of HTTP/1.1. This post Read article

⏱ 10 min read Connection pooling is one of those infrastructure details that seems mundane until it isn’t — at which point your application Read article

⏱ 6 min read OAuth 2.0 and JWT are the foundation of authentication and authorization in modern web services. Despite being widely used, the Read article

⏱ 8 min read Garbage collection is the automatic memory management mechanism used by runtimes like the JVM, .NET CLR, and Go. Understanding its Read article

⏱ 11 min read Columnar databases power modern analytics workloads — data warehouses, BI dashboards, log analytics, and time-series aggregations. Understanding their internals helps Read article