System Design

⏱ 9 min read Poll and voting systems appear in everything from social media reactions to high-stakes organizational decisions. The engineering challenges span idempotent […] Read article

⏱ 6 min read Road Graph Storage A map is modeled as a directed weighted graph. Nodes represent intersections and road endpoints, each storing Read article

⏱ 8 min read Designing a media encoding pipeline requires coordinating upload handling, distributed transcoding, codec decisions, and delivery optimization into a coherent system. Read article

⏱ 9 min read Search autocomplete is a latency-critical, high-read-volume system that combines data structures, probabilistic algorithms, and multi-layer caching to return relevant suggestions Read article

⏱ 9 min read A database connection pool is one of the most impactful infrastructure components in any application that talks to a relational Read article

⏱ 9 min read Envelope Encryption The foundation of any secret management system is encryption at rest. Naive approaches encrypt every secret directly with Read article

⏱ 9 min read PKI Hierarchy A certificate authority system is built on a chain of trust. The root CA is the ultimate trust Read article

⏱ 8 min read Low level design of an e-commerce platform requires thinking through a wide surface area: how products are modeled and indexed, Read article

⏱ 5 min read Flag Data Model The core schema for a feature flag system is a flags table with these fields: flag_key (unique Read article

⏱ 9 min read Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft are canonical low level design problems because they combine real-time geospatial data, distributed state Read article

⏱ 8 min read Carpooling systems share many building blocks with on-demand ride-sharing but add significant complexity: multiple passengers must be matched to a Read article

⏱ 9 min read Dockless bike and scooter sharing systems combine IoT device management, real-time fleet tracking, geofencing enforcement, and per-minute billing. The design Read article

⏱ 7 min read Log Ingestion Pipeline Every host in the fleet runs a lightweight log shipping agent. Filebeat or Fluent Bit tails log Read article

⏱ 7 min read Metric Types Prometheus defines four core metric types. Counter: a monotonically increasing integer that never decreases except on process restart. Read article

⏱ 9 min read Video streaming at scale involves multiple specialized subsystems working in tight coordination: upload pipelines, real-time transcoding, adaptive bitrate delivery, content Read article