Web Crawler System Design: Frontier, Politeness, and Dedup
How a URL frontier, robots.txt, and dedup let you crawl the web at scale without duplicate pages or a ban
Search across 295 posts, 23 explainers, and 105 topics
Load Balancing Explained: L4 vs L7
How layer 4 and layer 7 balancers pick a server, which algorithms survive uneven work, and when anycast beats DNS
Key Range Partitions in Distributed Systems
How sorted keys make range queries fast, why sequential writes create hotspots, and how to choose a better partition key
How the Software Engineer Role Is Changing with AI
What Amazon, Shopify, Google, and Microsoft are asking of SDEs, and how to stay useful when the editor can draft the diff
Generation Clock Pattern in Distributed Systems Explained
How a single increasing number fences zombie leaders and stops two replica histories from being spliced together
How 700 OpenAI Agents Broke Into Hugging Face
The true story of a missing file, a secret message board, a sandbox escape, and the AI security lessons every developer needs
How to Save Money on AI Assisted Coding
Model choice, smaller context, and prompt caching habits that keep Cursor, Copilot, and Claude Code bills under control
What Is A/B Testing and How It Works?
How to run an experiment, read a p-value, and avoid fake winners
Follower Reads Pattern in Distributed Systems
How to serve queries from replicas so the leader stays fast, and how much staleness you accept in return
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
