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 us...
Designing Systems Series
Software system design in practice: drawing boundaries, managing state, designing APIs and data contracts, handling overload, and distributed trade-offs.
Data as a Product is a Promise
Domaindriven design (DDD) has been around for quite a long time. In short, DDD focuses on domain to match domain requirements. One of the pillars of DDD is bounded context. A bo...
Good APIs Age Slowly
I have noticed that APIs are a bit like abstractions in general. APIs that impress people quickly are very often the ones that cause the most trouble later. I do not mean this a...
Compatibility Is a Feature
A system only reveals what it's made of when it starts changing. At first, they often look better than they are because the code is still new. The data is still fairly clean. Th...
Message Brokers Are Modern Grids
While working on my book on , I keep noticing the same pattern. Some systems look simple while they belong to one team and become something else after everybody starts using the...
You Cannot Fix What You Cannot See
I have been working on this data discovery tool for a while, and it keeps showing me how messy our systems really are. The idea behind it is simple. Crawl every database we have...
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 righ...
You Know State Is NO Good
Every engineer learns this the hard way. You think the logic is solid, your tests are green, and your deployment goes smoothly. Looks all good, right? Then you have an outage. N...
Why Over-Engineering Happens
If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched...
XA Transactions: A Simple Guide
In early days of computing, there was no need for distributed transactions, everything lived in one place. As number of applications increased, synchronization of the data becom...