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.
System Design articles
11 articles about System Design, written from hands-on experience building and scaling production systems.
- 7 min
- 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.
- 8 min
Redis Caching Strategies That Survive Production
Cache-aside, write-through and write-behind in Node.js, plus what tutorials skip: invalidation, TTL jitter, cache stampedes, hot keys and eviction.
- 7 min
Shipping LLM Features to Production: Evals, Guardrails and Cost
Ship reliable LLM features: evaluation sets, structured outputs, prompt-injection guardrails, streaming and latency budgets, caching and cost control.
- 5 min
RAG Pipelines Explained: Building AI That Actually Knows Your Data
A practical guide to RAG pipelines: embeddings, vector databases, chunking, retrieval quality and prompt design for AI grounded in your own data.
- 5 min
Scaling Node.js: From Single Server to Handling Millions of Requests
Scale Node.js from one server to millions of requests: clustering, horizontal scaling, load balancing, Redis caching, worker threads and monitoring.
- 5 min
Why Your API Is Slow (And How to Fix It)
Diagnose and fix slow APIs: N+1 queries, missing indexes, payload bloat, connection pool exhaustion and caching, with Node.js and SQL examples.
- 14 min
Building a Modern Search System: Debouncing, Ranking, Real-Time
How to build production search: frontend debouncing, ranking algorithms, Elasticsearch fundamentals and real-time index updates with change data capture.
Other topics
Backend 12Performance 7Distributed Systems 6Architecture 4Node.js 4AI Engineering 3LLM 3Redis 3Tutorial 3API Design 2Career 2CTO 2Engineering Management 2Leadership 2PostgreSQL 2Startups 2Web Development 2Caching 1CDC 1Cloud 1Consulting 1Databases 1DevOps 1Docker 1Elasticsearch 1Frontend 1Interviews 1JavaScript 1Kafka 1MCP 1Microservices 1Mobile 1Next.js 1Personal Branding 1Production 1RabbitMQ 1RAG 1React 1Search 1SEO 1SQL 1TypeScript 1