Tag
#System Design
14posts
Caching & Redis: The 'Sticky Note' Mental Model
Why does Redis make everything faster? A mastery guide to cache invalidation (the hardest problem in CS), eviction strategies, and Redis data types.
CDN: The 'Local Convenience Store' Mental Model
Why does your image load instantly for users in the US but crawls in Vietnam? A mastery guide to CDN Edge Nodes, Cache-Control headers, and cache busting.
Task Queues & Message Brokers: Celery, RabbitMQ, and Kafka Untangled
Why does sending an email block your API? A mastery guide to async task queues (Celery/Django-Q), message brokers (RabbitMQ), and event streaming (Kafka).
Rate Limiting & Circuit Breaker: The 'Traffic Light & Fuse Box' Mental Model
How do you stop one bad client from taking down your entire API? A mastery guide to rate limiting strategies, circuit breakers, and resilience patterns.
Why Cheap Hardware Won't Make Redis Replace a Core Database
As hardware gets cheaper, why not use Redis as the main database? The short answer: because the limitation isn't speed. It's guarantees and data semantics.
REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC: The 'Restaurant Menu' Mental Model
Why does GraphQL exist if REST works fine? A mastery guide to API protocols, when to use each, and how gRPC changes the game for internal services.
API Certificates: The Mastery Guide to Debugging & The Chain of Trust
Stop guessing with SSLErrors. A mastery-level guide to the Chain of Trust, openssl debugging, and proving exactly whose fault it is.
Authentication vs. Authorization vs. OAuth: The 'ID Card' Mental Model
Stop mixing up 401 and 403. A mastery guide to AuthN (Who you are), AuthZ (What you can do), and the OAuth Valet Key.
Consistent Hashing: The 'Locker Room' Mental Model
How does Cassandra know which server stores your data? Master consistent hashing, virtual nodes, and scaling distributed systems reliably.
Latency vs. Throughput: The 'Water Pipe' Mental Model
Why is your API slow even though your internet is fast? A mastery guide to P99 latency, bandwidth, and finding the bottleneck.
Load Balancer, Reverse Proxy, API Gateway: The Grand Hotel Mental Model
Confused by the 'Traffic Trio'? A mastery-level guide to Load Balancers, Reverse Proxies, and API Gateways — from mental models to Nginx configs.
Monolith vs. Microservices: The 'Mansion vs. Village' Mental Model
Is Microservices mostly hype? A mastery guide to the 'Distributed Monolith', Latency taxes, and knowing when to split.
Partitioning, Bucketing, Sharding, Replication, Edge: The Clean Mental Model
A precise mental model for partitioning, bucketing, sharding, replication, and edge computing - when to use each and why they exist at different layers.
SQL vs. NoSQL: The 'Library vs. Warehouse' Mental Model
Why is MongoDB faster but Postgres safer? A mastery guide to Schema, ACID, and why JSONB might be the only NoSQL you need.