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Beginner-friendly guides to system design and distributed systems - from clocks and CRDTs to databases, messaging, and scaling - explained with simple language and real-world examples.
The Million-Dollar Race Condition Picture this: Arijit Singh announces a surprise concert. Within seconds, 2 million fans are quickly clicking "Buy Now" for the last 50,000 seats. At 3:00:01 PM, seat A-14 shows as available on 10,000 different screen...
Introduction: Why Metrics & Logs Aren’t Enough Imagine you’re debugging a checkout flow in an e-commerce system: Metrics say latency has spiked. Logs show database timeouts. But you don’t know: Which request was slow? Which service in the chain ca...
Introduction: Why Logs Matter Imagine you’re running a Payment API. Metrics tell you: “Error rate = 5% in the last 10 minutes.” But metrics don’t tell you why. To debug, you need logs — the detailed “story” of what happened inside your system. Lo...
Introduction: Why Metrics Matter Imagine you’re running an API for an e-commerce checkout system. Users are complaining that "checkout feels slow." Your dashboard shows CPU usage is fine. What’s wrong? Without metrics, you’d be guessing in the d...
Introduction: Why Conflicts Happen in Distributed Systems Imagine you and your friend are both editing the same shared to-do list. You add “Buy milk”. At the same time, your friend adds “Buy bread”. When the system tries to merge these updates, w...
Introduction: Why Do Systems Fail So Badly? Imagine you’re on a cruise ship 🛳️. One part of the ship gets a hole — does the entire ship sink immediately? No. Ships are divided into sealed compartments (bulkheads) so that damage in one part doesn’t f...
