Cache Invalidation Is Not the Hard Part
Deleting a key is one line. The hard parts are the copies you forgot, the read-write race that leaves stale data with clean logs, and the stampede at expiry.
5 min read
Posts tagged Architecture
7 posts, newest first.
Microservices Were Never About Scale
Teams split monoliths for throughput and got an org-chart fix. The honest case is deploy cadence and ownership — plus narrow cases where boundaries help load.
5 min read
Postgres Until It Hurts: The Operational Case for One Database Doing Several Jobs
The pendulum swung back to one relational database for documents, queues, search and vectors: the case for it, and where a specialised system still wins.
6 min read
What AI Agents Changed About System Design: The Request Is Now a Loop
Agents made non-determinism, unbounded iteration and per-request spend ordinary concerns. What that does to timeouts, idempotency, capacity and observability.
5 min read
You Probably Do Not Need Kafka
Most teams reaching for a distributed log want a queue, or a table with a status column. What a log costs to run, and the four properties that justify one.
5 min read
Five Load Balancing Algorithms, and When Each One Betrays You
Round-robin, least-connections, IP hash, weighted and random: what each does to your tail latency, and when the popular default is the wrong choice.
5 min read
Why Static Diagrams Fail You in System Design Interviews
A box-and-arrow diagram can't tell you whether your design works. Here's what interviewers are probing for, and why drawing tools can't help you practice it.
4 min read
