REST API Design: Pagination, Versioning, and Best Practices
A guide to designing production-grade REST APIs — resource naming, HTTP methods, pagination strategies, versioning, and error handling.
The Archive of
Intentional Thought
Technical essays, architectural deep-dives, and practical guides at the intersection of code and design.
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Efficient Data Modelling: A Practical Guide for Production Systems
A hands-on guide to data modelling — normalization tradeoffs, indexing strategies, access-pattern-driven schemas, and safe schema evolution.
Deep Dive on Caching: From Browser to Database
A guide to caching in distributed systems — layers, invalidation strategies, eviction policies, thundering herd and hot keys, with Redis patterns.
System Design Patterns for Real-Time Updates at High Traffic
How to build real-time systems handling millions of connections — WebSockets, SSE, pub/sub fan-out, presence tracking, and backpressure.
System Design Patterns for Scaling Writes
A practical guide to scaling write-heavy systems — sharding strategies, write-ahead logs, async queues, event sourcing, and batching.
System Design Patterns for Managing Long-Running Tasks
How to design systems that reliably execute long-running tasks — async job queues, progress tracking, retries, checkpointing, and sagas.
System Design Patterns for Handling Large Blobs
How to design systems that upload, store, process, and serve large binary objects at scale — presigned URLs, chunked uploads, and CDN tiering.
Explaining SAGA Patterns with Examples
A deep dive into the SAGA pattern for distributed transactions — orchestration vs choreography, compensation flows, and production code.
Deep Dive on Consistent Hashing
A guide to consistent hashing — how it works, why it matters for distributed systems, virtual nodes, and production use in Redis and DynamoDB.
Serverless vs Containers — The Decision I Keep Revisiting
A practical guide to choosing between AWS Lambda and containers for production workloads — cold starts, cost modeling, and real tradeoffs.
System Design Patterns for Scaling Reads
A practical guide to scaling read-heavy systems — caching strategies, read replicas, CQRS, and materialized views, with architecture diagrams.
Prompt Engineering Patterns That Actually Work in Production
Six battle-tested prompt engineering patterns for production LLM systems, with real code and real failure modes tutorials leave out.