Recent Posts
Systems Design for Advanced Beginners: Anatomy of Infrastructure from Simple Monolith to Production Scale
You have shipped a few small websites. You can stand up a CRUD app in Django, Laravel, or Gin in an afternoon. But then you look at the architecture behind a real platform - Stripe, GitHub, or a mid-sized marketplace - and wonder: what is actually behind the curtain, and how does it survive tens of millions of users?
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LLMs Reward Expertise: Why Deep Domain Knowledge Matters More as AI Gets Smarter
The old CSS gap and the new backend gap Back in the 2010s, if you had a skill gap - say, you couldn’t write CSS - you had exactly two options: lean on a more skilled colleague, or pray someone had posted the answer to your precise problem on Stack Overflow.
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DevOps Is Bullshit: The Illusion of 'You build it, you run it' and the Rise of Platform Engineering
A backend engineer needs an IAM role so their service can read the S3 bucket holding customer invoices. They open Jira, pick the “Infrastructure Request” template, fill in twelve fields, attach the exact labels the README tells them to attach, and hit Create. Three days later, the role exists.
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Knight Capital 2012: Dead Code, a Repurposed Flag, and $440M Gone in 45 Minutes
August 1, 2012. 9:30 AM Eastern. The opening bell at the NYSE.
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Lore: Epic Games Open-Sources a VCS Built for Massive Binaries
Game repositories are not web repositories. In an engine the size of Unreal, most of the weight is binary assets, textures, meshes, world partitions, hundreds of MB to several GB each, churned by thousands of artists and developers. Git handles that badly: LFS is a bolt-on dragging whole 2 GB files, dedup is capped by pack deltas, partial clone plus sparse checkout is experimental, and offline means fail.
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Practical System Design: The Quiet Elegance of Boring Architecture
Junior engineers often assume that impressive system design requires a complex web of microservices, event streaming through Apache Kafka, CQRS patterns, and distributed consensus mechanisms running across every cluster.
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