Backend

Practical System Design: The Quiet Elegance of Boring Architecture

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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Lies We Tell Ourselves to Keep Using Golang

Lies We Tell Ourselves to Keep Using Golang

In the backend engineering community, Golang (Go) is frequently praised for its radical simplicity. From microservices at Google, Uber, and Grab to core infrastructure projects like Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, Go seems to be everywhere. Engineers routinely swap familiar praises: “Go is dead simple to learn,” “Concurrency in Go is practically free thanks to Goroutines,” and “The Go toolchain compiles instantly into a single self-contained binary.”

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Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default: A performance trick on unstable networks

Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default: A performance trick on unstable networks

Hello everyone, today I want to share with you a funny and sad story that I and many of my fellow system engineers have experienced.

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API Filtering: retrieving data like a coffee connoisseur

API Filtering: retrieving data like a coffee connoisseur

In my first year of working, I once wrote an endpoint GET /api/menus that returned… the entire menu. 200 items every time it was called. The JSON was 1.2MB heavy. The frontend only needed the name and price of 10 active dishes. I remember the first thing my lead said: “You’re sending the entire warehouse to someone who just needs to view the menu, aren’t you?”

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