#system-design

Articles tagged with #system-design

You Can't Manage What You Can't See: The Three Pillars of Observability
Series: Backend Engineering Fundamentals · Post 07 of 07 Level: Intermediate · Read time: ~9 min It's 2am. An alert fires. Your service is down. You open your dashboard: CPU is fine, memory is fine.
Mar 26, 202610 min read12
Scaling: Before You Buy More Servers, Read This
Series: Backend Engineering Fundamentals · Post 06 of 07 Level: Beginner-friendly · Read time: ~8 min "We need to scale" is one of the most expensive sentences in engineering. It triggers infrastruc
Mar 26, 20269 min read5
When to Stop Calling APIs and Start Publishing Events
Series: Backend Engineering Fundamentals · Post 05 of 07 Level: Advanced · Read time: ~10 min Picture a simple checkout flow: user places an order → charge the card → update inventory → send a confi
Mar 26, 20268 min read2
SQL or NoSQL? Wrong Question. Here's the Right One.
Series: Backend Engineering Fundamentals · Post 04 of 07 Level: Intermediate · Read time: ~9 min Every few years the industry declares SQL dead, or NoSQL dead, or NewSQL the future. Meanwhile, produ
Mar 26, 20268 min read1
Auth Is Not Security: What Engineers Get Wrong About Protecting APIs
Series: Backend Engineering Fundamentals · Post 03 of 07 Level: Advanced · Read time: ~10 min Most API security bugs aren't cryptography failures. They're design failures. The OWASP API Security Top
Mar 26, 20268 min read1
Cache Invalidation: The Problem That Humbles Every Engineer
Series: Backend Engineering Fundamentals · Post 02 of 07 Level: Intermediate · Read time: ~9 min Phil Karlton famously said there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation a
Mar 25, 20269 min read18