System Design

⏱ 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

⏱ 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

⏱ 9 min read What Is gRPC? gRPC is a high-performance, open-source remote procedure call framework developed by Google. It uses Protocol Buffers (protobuf) Read article

⏱ 8 min read What Is a Full-Text Search Engine? A full-text search engine indexes large collections of text documents and retrieves the most Read article

⏱ 7 min read A Merkle tree (invented by Ralph Merkle in 1979) is a binary tree in which every leaf node contains the Read article

⏱ 7 min read What Is Event Sourcing? In traditional systems, the database stores the current state of an entity. When an order changes Read article

⏱ 7 min read A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend instances to maximize throughput, minimize latency, and avoid overloading any single Read article

⏱ 8 min read Trie Node Structure Each node in a trie holds a fixed-size array of 26 child pointers (one per lowercase letter) Read article

⏱ 8 min read Token Bucket The token bucket algorithm models a bucket of capacity B tokens that refills at rate R tokens per Read article

⏱ 5 min read Log-Based Storage Modern message queues (Kafka, Pulsar, Redpanda) use an append-only log as the storage primitive. Producers write messages sequentially Read article

⏱ 8 min read Mutex Basics A mutex (mutual exclusion lock) guarantees that only one thread can hold it at any given time. The Read article

⏱ 9 min read Compare-and-Swap (CAS) Compare-and-Swap is the atomic instruction at the heart of all lock-free algorithms. It takes three operands: a memory Read article

⏱ 5 min read Query Parsing Query execution begins with parsing the raw SQL text. A lexer (scanner) tokenizes the input into keywords, identifiers, Read article

⏱ 13 min read Stack vs Heap Allocation Every running program uses two distinct memory regions for dynamic data: the stack and the heap. Read article