Engineering notes
Systems, built from first principles.
Long-form walkthroughs that design and build real infrastructure, one component at a time. Each post starts from requirements, weighs the options, and ends in working code with its failure modes written down.
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Latest09/26Designing a URL ShortenerA small service with a demanding read path, built end to end: how to mint short codes that never collide, and how to keep redirects fast when reads outnumber writes a hundred to one. Go · Architecture · Caching · 9 minComing soonA Distributed Lock ManagerLeases, fencing tokens and what happens when the clock lies.Get notified when it’s out
Groups
More groups are on the way.Group
System Design
From a single-process rate limiter to a Raft-backed store and the infrastructure behind LLM apps. Read in order or jump to what you need.
2 published3 coming soon
Foundations
Single-process building blocksDistributed services
Coordination, delivery and storage across machines- 02Designing a URL ShortenerA small service with a demanding read path, built end to end: how to mint short codes that never collide, and how to keep redirects fast when reads outnumber writes a hundred to one. Go · Architecture · Caching · 9 min09/2615 September 2026
- 03A Distributed Lock ManagerLeases, fencing tokens and what happens when the clock lies.Coming soon
- 04A Key-Value Store on RaftLeader election, log replication and linearizable reads.Coming soon
AI infrastructure
Retrieval, inference and evaluation for LLM apps- 05RAG with Hybrid SearchKeyword and vector retrieval, rank fusion and reranking.Coming soon
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