Archive - Architecture Notes — System Design & Software Development

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Learn what's changing (and what's not) as we join the Substack Network!

May 21 •

January 2023

How does technical debt accrue? Most people would say bad engineering. What is bad engineering? Inflexibility? Is one system engineered correctly to do…

Jan 26, 2023 •

Locking and Contention

The lock mechanism is an integral part of any modern system. In software applications, locks are used to ensure that multiple users do not…

Jan 10, 2023 •

December 2022

Capture the Flag

Join the Architecture Notes CTF and test your system design skills against participants from around the world. Solve challenges in distributed systems…

Dec 30, 2022 •

Circuit Breakers

Circuit breakers are a vital component of any distributed system, helping to improve reliability and resilience by preventing failures from cascading…

Dec 20, 2022 •

Database Sharding Explained

More features, active users, and data are collected daily. Your database is slowing your application. Many people don't understand database sharding…

Dec 12, 2022 •

November 2022

Virtualization Explained

The development of cloud-native applications has become significantly influenced by container technology. Building secure and reliable systems requires…

Nov 13, 2022 •

As we scale systems, it's essential to realize the impact of all the components in our systems and how they interact. For example, load balancers…

Nov 2, 2022 •

October 2022

12 Factor App Revisited

The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a methodology for building software-as-a-service applications by Adam Wiggins. We cover how they have since…

Oct 6, 2022 •

As you venture into more complicated architecture setups, there are a few things engineers sometimes don't understand when setting up consensus-based…

Oct 1, 2022 •

September 2022

Types of Memory

There is often a level of focus on the bigger picture when it comes to system design, but we often don't think about the underlying components in these…

Sep 3, 2022 •

Understanding latency is essential in all parts of our systems, including registers, main memory, disk, and network.

Sep 1, 2022 •

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