Thoughts, tutorials, and deep dives into backend engineering, scalable architecture, and engineering leadership.
System design is more than just drawing boxes. It's about understanding tradeoffs, failure modes, and building for the future.
An exploration of how NestJS brings much-needed structure and architectural patterns to the Node.js ecosystem.
Stop guessing and start analyzing. How to read EXPLAIN plans and optimize your database queries effectively.
The network is not reliable. Latency is not zero. How these age-old fallacies still bite modern microservices.
Transitioning from writing code to solving business problems through technology.
Web architecture is the backbone of modern applications. Explore the client-server model, thin vs thick clients, and server roles.
Dive into how systems communicate using the stateless HTTP protocol and the advantages of building decoupled REST APIs.
Comparing HTTP Pull vs Push models. Learn when to use polling vs WebSockets for real-time notifications and chat applications.
Understand the fundamentals of scalability and latency. Learn the difference between network and application latency.
Explore the differences between scaling up (vertical) and scaling out (horizontal), and when to use each approach.
Why stateless architectures rule the web, and how to effectively manage user sessions across multiple servers.
Understanding the invisible pillars of system design: performance, security, availability, and maintainability.
Demystifying 'Five Nines' of availability and calculating system downtime.
Measuring reliability through Mean Time Between Failures and Mean Time To Recovery.
Why writing clean code, thorough documentation, and CI/CD pipelines are crucial for long-term system success.
How DNS translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses, and the mechanics of DNS resolution.
Distributing traffic across multiple servers to ensure high availability and reliability.
Using DNS to route traffic to different IP addresses, including Round-Robin and Geolocation strategies.
Examining traditional, physical load balancing appliances like F5 BIG-IP.
The shift to NGINX, HAProxy, and cloud-native load balancing solutions.
Round Robin, Least Connections, and IP Hashing: How load balancers decide where to send traffic.
Accelerating application performance by keeping frequently accessed data in memory.
Understanding Cache Aside, Write-Through strategies, and LRU eviction.
Comparing the two dominant open-source distributed caching technologies.
Decoupling systems using asynchronous messaging platforms like RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka.
Scaling databases horizontally by splitting large datasets across multiple instances.