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Practical writing on software engineering, infrastructure, and the systems behind production software.

Databases Distributed Systems System Design

Designing a URL Shortener: Everything I Learned After Reading a Dozen Articles and Failing This Question Once

Designing a URL Shortener: Everything I Learned After Reading a Dozen Articles and Failing This Question Once

Pankaj Chauhan 9 hours ago

System Design Interview: Designing a Rate Limiter

Pankaj Chauhan 5 days ago

Editorial illustration of a lock over a Redis-style key grid

How Redis Distributed Locks Work

Pankaj Chauhan 13 days ago

Parallel stream illustration representing Kafka partitions

Kafka Partitions Explained

Pankaj Chauhan 28 days ago

Illustration of a database split across several shards

Understanding Database Sharding

Pankaj Chauhan 2 months ago

Illustration of a long URL being compressed into a short code

How a URL Shortener Works

Pankaj Chauhan 4 months ago