How I'd Design a Scalable Notification System
6 min read
System design for a multi-channel notification system covering delivery guarantees, rate limiting, user preferences, and failure handling at scale.
What Breaks First When Traffic Scales
7 min read
A catalog of components that fail first under increasing traffic, ordered by how commonly they become bottlenecks in web applications.
Scaling Isn't the Hard Part, Debugging Is
6 min read
Why the real challenge of operating at scale is not handling load but diagnosing problems in systems too large and too fast for any one person to fully understand.
Why Simple Systems Scale Better
6 min read
An argument for architectural simplicity as a scaling strategy, with examples of how complexity creates bottlenecks that simple designs avoid.
How I'd Design a Mobile Configuration System at Scale
7 min read
Designing a configuration system for mobile apps at scale, covering config delivery, caching layers, override hierarchies, and safe rollout of config changes.
Benchmarking Database Writes Under Load
7 min read
Measured write throughput and latency for Postgres under increasing concurrency, comparing single inserts, batch inserts, COPY, and async writes.
Load Testing Mobile Backends With Realistic Traffic
8 min read
Designing load tests that replicate mobile traffic patterns including bursty connections, mixed network conditions, and session-based workflows.
Why Most Scaling Advice Is Context-Dependent
7 min read
An examination of why scaling advice that worked at one company often fails at another, and how to evaluate scaling strategies based on your actual constraints rather than borrowed wisdom.
Experimenting With Background Workers at Scale
8 min read
Testing job queue architectures with BullMQ, Postgres-based queues, and SQS under increasing job volumes, with failure handling and scaling measurements.