Service Overload Strategies

Service overload happens a lot. If you haven’t seen one, count yourself lucky. The first time I watched it take a system down, I realized how serious it’s to get the basics right and implement mechanisms to avoid it. I remember how it brought down our social services to its knees in the early 2010s. There was no autoscaling, we […]

Designing A Key-Value Store

I’ve been asked once to design a key value store in an interview. It looks easy at first. Then it gets hard, fast.  What makes it interesting is how ambiguous it is. I started using it for interviewing staff+ level myself as well, because the ambiguity is really hard to get right. I like this question because you can approach […]