System Design Article
Practical guides on AI, DSA, full stack, cloud, and career growth.
Showing 23 articles
CDN Explained: The System Design Concept Every Developer Should Understand
How edge servers, caching, and intelligent routing make websites faster, reduce backend load, and protect applications.
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Sharding Explained: Why One Database Is Never Enough (Eventually)
Walkthrough of how big systems split their data — and why almost every engineer needs to understand this at some point
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How We Went From 4-Second Queries to 40ms Without Buying a Single New Server
The two boring, well-known database techniques that fixed our slow checkout page — indexing and read replicas, explained step by step.
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SQL vs NoSQL: How Do You Actually Decide Which Database to Use?
Don’t start with “Which database is better?” Start with “What does my system need?”
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Caching in System Design for Beginners
What caching actually does, where it fits in your system, and why adding a cache can create problems you didn’t expect.
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The 3 AM Outage That Taught Me What a Load Balancer Actually Does
I got paged at 3:14 AM. Our “unbreakable” server had just face-planted in front of 70,000 users. Here’s the ugly, honest story of what actually happened — and the one piece of infrastructure I had been ignoring for years.
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What Is a Load Balancer? A Beginner’s Guide With Real Examples and Code
From traffic police to Anycast routing — hardware, software, and cloud load balancers explained with real examples, not textbook definitions.
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GitHub Went Down for 24 Hours Because of CAP Theorem That You Learned in Just 5 Minutes
On October 21, 2018, GitHub had a network problem that lasted 43 seconds. That small problem caused GitHub to be broken for 24 hours and 11 minutes.
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Your API Is Fast. So Why Is Your System Still Slow?
The simple difference between latency, throughput, p90, p99, and scalability that every developer should understand
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What a Bad Flash Sale Taught Me About Latency and Throughput
The night a flash sale taught me that average latency is a lie, and throughput isn’t what most engineers think it is.
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