Stream Processing Explained: Kafka, Flink, and Real-Time Data Pipelines
How unbounded events get transformed as they arrive, why event time matters more than the wall clock, and how to pick between Kafka Streams, Flink, and a plain consumer
Search across 277 posts, 23 explainers, and 95 topics
Serverless Computing Explained: How It Works and When to Use It
What actually happens when a Lambda runs, why cold starts exist, how the billing works, and the workloads where serverless is the wrong answer
Time Series Databases Explained: InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, and Prometheus
How TSDBs store, compress, and query timestamped data, and how to pick InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, Prometheus, or ClickHouse
How Google manages billions of lines of code in one monorepo
Piper, CitC, Bazel, and trunk-based development: the tooling that makes billions of lines of code feel like one tree
Claude Code Skills: How to Create and Use Agent Skills
A practical Claude Code skills guide: write SKILL.md, pick .claude/skills vs CLAUDE.md, inject a live git diff, gate deploys, and share playbooks through Git and plugins
Fixed Partitions Pattern in Distributed Systems
Why hashing keys straight to nodes falls apart when a cluster grows, and how a fixed layer of logical partitions keeps data movement small
Cuckoo Filter: A Better Bloom Filter That Supports Deletion
How fingerprints and cuckoo hashing give you fast membership tests, real deletes, and less memory than a Bloom filter
Dropbox System Design: How Cloud File Storage Works
How chunking, deduplication, delta sync, and a metadata service let Dropbox store and sync billions of files reliably
How Java Debugging Works: Inside JPDA, JDWP, and JDI
How the JVM lets you set breakpoints, step through code, and attach a debugger to a running Java process, explained from the inside out
How the JVM Works: From Bytecode to Native Code
A clear, practical walk through how the Java Virtual Machine loads, verifies, executes, and optimizes your code at runtime
Emergent Leader Pattern in Distributed Systems
How peer-to-peer clusters pick a coordinator by age, without ever running a leader election
Columnar Databases Explained: ClickHouse, BigQuery, and Redshift
How column-oriented storage, compression, and vectorized execution make analytical queries 10 to 100 times faster
Wide Column Stores Explained: Cassandra, Bigtable, and ScyllaDB
How the partition key, clustering key, and LSM storage make wide column databases scale to millions of writes per second
