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LatestFebruary 14, 2026 (5d ago)5 min read

Why Your Database Is Not a Message Queue (And the Disaster That Follows When You Treat It Like One)

The most common architectural antipattern in production systems — using your database as a message queue — and why it silently destroys your application at scale.

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The Architecture Behind Serving 40 Million Requests Per Second: Lessons from Uber's Caching Strategy

How Uber built an integrated caching layer that handles 40M+ requests per second, and the caching patterns every engineer should steal from big tech.

7 min

From Monolith to Microservices: The Journey Nobody Warns You About

The real story of breaking apart a monolith — including the parts conference talks conveniently leave out. Distributed transactions, data consistency nightmares, and why Uber went back.

7 min

How Netflix Delivers Video to 230 Million Users Without a Single Buffering Icon

A deep dive into Netflix's video processing pipeline — from shot-based encoding to multi-region failover — and why their architecture decisions are brilliant.

7 min

The Brilliant Algorithm Behind Google Docs: How Real-Time Collaboration Actually Works

Operational Transformation — the algorithm that lets 50 people edit the same document simultaneously without conflicts. Here's how it works, why it's hard, and what replaced it.

7 min

Distributed Databases Demystified: How Cassandra, DynamoDB, and BigTable Actually Work Under the Hood

Stop treating NoSQL databases as black boxes. Here's how LSM trees, consistent hashing, and gossip protocols power the databases behind Netflix, Amazon, and Google.

8 min

Why Every Senior Engineer Should Master Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations

The skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn't coding — it's the ability to estimate system capacity in 5 minutes on a whiteboard. Here's how to build that muscle.

7 min

The Invisible Infrastructure: How Service Meshes Quietly Revolutionized Microservices

Service meshes moved networking logic out of your application code and into infrastructure. Here's why that matters, how sidecars work, and when you actually need one.

8 min

Detecting the Invisible: How Big Tech Finds Anomalies in Billions of Data Points

When your system generates millions of metrics per second, how do you spot the one that's about to cause an outage? Inside the anomaly detection systems at Uber, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

8 min

Consistent Hashing: The Algorithm That Quietly Powers Half the Internet

From DynamoDB to Discord, from Akamai to Cassandra — one algorithm decides where your data lives. Here's how consistent hashing works, why it's brilliant, and how Google improved it.

9 min
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