Articles on system design, failure modes, architecture tradeoffs, and engineering leadership.
FM4, two-phase commit, the in-doubt problem, and the saga alternative
Queue vs stack — the web crawler, the dependency resolver, and the garbage collector
When duplication cost exceeds the cost of a shared solution — and why adoption is the only metric that matters
Cost of delay, total cost of ownership, and the three-number structure a board can actually evaluate
Functional core, imperative shell — and why a race condition has nothing to race on
Event-driven fan-out: one trigger, many channel deliveries, and the thundering herd
One structure — nodes and edges — in the web, a dependency tree, the heap, a social network, and your org chart
Why the big-bang rewrite has no working state to return to — and refactoring does
FM3, rate limiting, and the defence-in-depth assumption that turns a spike into an outage
The four-step method: find the bottleneck, name the data structure, name the algorithm, name the complexity
Metcalfe’s Law, power-law nodes, and the architecture cost that arrives before the value
Traverse from category to structure to risk — not from symptom to fix.
Every interface hides complexity. A good one chooses, narrowly and correctly, what to expose.
It looks like a CRUD app and behaves like a distributed system — the two tradeoffs that decide it.
Why a B-tree is just a binary search tree redesigned for the cost of a single disk read.
Onboarding cost, quadratic communication overhead, and a contributor who breaks even after the deadline.
Throughput and latency pull against each other past saturation — and the mean latency hides the system you actually shipped.
Nine lenses for seeing, building, and diagnosing systems — and the dependency chain between them.
The mechanism that makes complex systems manageable — and why they all leak eventually.
The TTL, the token, and the three failure modes that cause silent data corruption.
Context, container, component, data flow, and deployment — each answers a different question.