How to Approach a System Design Interview: A CTO's Framework
A step-by-step system design interview framework from a CTO who runs them: requirements, estimation, API and data design, deep dives and trade-offs.
Distributed Systems articles
6 articles about Distributed Systems, written from hands-on experience building and scaling production systems.
- 7 min
- 6 min
Idempotency Keys: How to Make API Retries Safe
How idempotency keys stop double charges when clients retry: the design, a PostgreSQL and Node.js implementation, edge cases and idempotent consumers.
- 8 min
Kafka vs RabbitMQ vs Redis Streams: Choosing a Message Queue
Kafka vs RabbitMQ vs Redis Streams compared: ordering, delivery guarantees, replay, throughput and operations, plus a decision guide from production.
- 6 min
Monolith vs Microservices: How to Choose, and When to Split
Monolith vs modular monolith vs microservices: the real costs, the signals that justify splitting, drawing service boundaries and the strangler fig.
- 7 min
Offline-First Architecture: Building Apps That Work on Bad Networks
Design offline-first apps: local-first storage, an outbox for writes, idempotent sync, conflict resolution and backends that absorb reconnect storms.
- 7 min
Rate Limiting Algorithms Explained: Token Bucket to Sliding Window
Fixed window, sliding window, token bucket and leaky bucket rate limiters explained, with atomic Redis Lua implementations and proper 429 responses.
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