Deep dives into architectural patterns, scalability strategies, and distributed system concepts that power modern backend infrastructure.
Round robin spreads requests evenly — right up until it hands the next request to a server that's already drowning. Even distribution of requests isn't the same as even distribution of load. Here's how the real algorithms decide where traffic goes, and when each one is the right call.
Your code works flawlessly on your laptop, then falls apart the moment it talks to another machine over a network. That's not bad luck — it's a set of assumptions every developer makes and the network quietly breaks. Here are the eight fallacies and how to design around them.
A single business action spans three services and there's no ACID transaction to save you. The saga pattern trades atomicity for a chain of local transactions and compensations. Here's how it works, when to reach for it, and the guarantees you quietly give up.
CRUD works until your reads and writes have fundamentally different needs. CQRS separates them into independent models -- giving each side the freedom to optimize without compromise. Here's when that separation pays off and when it's overkill.
Your services are tangled in synchronous calls, and one slow endpoint brings everything down. Event-driven architecture decouples your system with asynchronous messaging -- here's how it works, when it helps, and when it makes things worse.
Rate limiting isn't just about stopping bad actors. It's about protecting your infrastructure from traffic spikes, runaway clients, and your own frontend making too many calls. Here's how the four main algorithms actually work -- and when to use each one.
Your cache isn't just a faster database. Different caching strategies make fundamentally different trade-offs between consistency, latency, and complexity. Here's how to pick the right one.
When a dependency goes down, the worst thing your service can do is keep calling it. The circuit breaker pattern stops cascading failures before they take down your entire system.
A clear breakdown of when to use REST, GraphQL, or gRPC. Not opinions — control flow, trade-offs, and decision logic that actually helps you pick the right one for your system.