The Transactional Outbox Pattern: Never Lose an Event Again
This is one of those patterns that looks like nothing until you get burnt once…
Category
#software-design
26 posts
Event Sourcing, Explained: Store What Happened, Not Just the Final State
Here is a question I like to ask in interviews: your bank account shows a…
Change Data Capture (CDC): Stream Every Database Change Without Touching Your App
Your orders live in Postgres. But you also need them in Elasticsearch for search…
CQRS Pattern, Explained Simply: Split Your Writes From Your Reads
Most of us start our career with one model for everything. The same class, the…
The Circuit Breaker Pattern: Fail Fast, So One Dead Service Doesn't Kill Them All
Like the electrical switch in your home that it is named after, a circuit…
Performance, Measured: Percentiles, Profiling and the Laws That Decide What's Worth Optimizing
The single most expensive habit in performance work is optimizing by gut feel…
Message Queue vs Stream — RabbitMQ/SQS vs Kafka, and When to Use Which
“Should we use RabbitMQ or Kafka?” is one of the most common — and most muddled…
Idempotency in Distributed Systems — Why Your Retry Just Charged the Customer Twice
Here is a bug that has cost real companies real money: a customer taps “Pay ₹50…
Deep Dive on Apache Kafka: A System Design Interview Perspective
“Kafka is not a message queue. It’s a distributed commit log that happens to be…
Deep Dive on Elasticsearch: A System Design Interview Perspective
“If you’re searching, filtering, or aggregating over large volumes of semi…
Deep Dive on API Gateway: A System Design Interview Perspective
“An API Gateway is the front door to your microservices. Every request walks…
Deep Dive on Redis: Architecture, Data Structures, and Production Usage
“Redis is not just a cache. It’s a data structure server that happens to be…
REST API Design: Pagination, Versioning, and Best Practices
Every time two systems need to talk, someone has to design the contract between…
Efficient Data Modelling: A Practical Guide for Production Systems
Most engineers learn data modelling backwards. They draw an ER diagram…
Deep Dive on Caching: From Browser to Database
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and…
System Design Patterns for Real-Time Updates at High Traffic
The previous articles in this series covered scaling reads and scaling writes…
System Design Patterns for Scaling Writes
In the companion article on scaling reads, we covered caching, replicas, and…
System Design Patterns for Managing Long-Running Tasks
Introduction Some operations simply can’t finish in the time a user is willing…
System Design Patterns for Handling Large Blobs
Introduction Every non-trivial application eventually needs to handle large…
Explaining SAGA Patterns with Examples
In a monolith, placing an order is a single database transaction — deduct…
Deep Dive on Consistent Hashing
Every distributed system eventually faces the same problem: you have N servers…