Easy Learn
A plain-language walkthrough of the classic system-design interview moment. Covers: the big idea, why interviewers love the 100x question, what 100x really means in numbers, the four flavours of growth (more users, more requests, more data, wider geography), the mindset shift from correctness to survival, a reusable five-move loop, and…
A plain-language guide to capacity planning in system design: what it really is, why it matters, the different flavours of growth, the core ingredients (traffic, data, bandwidth), how to estimate traffic and peak load, storage and bandwidth, how to turn numbers into a server count, planning component by component, planning…
A plain-language guide to load balancers: what they really are, why they matter, how they work step by step, the two families of algorithms (static and dynamic) with every common variant, different kinds of traffic to balance, Layer 4 vs Layer 7, types by scope, hardware vs software, health checks…
A plain-language guide to the two most fundamental types of load balancing: static (round robin, weighted round robin, random, source IP hash, URL hash) and dynamic (least connections, weighted least connections, least response time, resource-based). Covers each algorithm in turn, a side-by-side comparison, real performance impact, how to choose between…
A plain-language, complete guide to back-of-the-envelope estimation: what it really is, where the name comes from, why interviewers care, the foundational numbers to keep in your back pocket, the common types of estimation, a repeatable six-step process, two fully worked examples (a photo-sharing app and a URL shortener), handy rules…
A gentle, thorough guide to one of the most useful ideas in software design: the box-of-clip-together-blocks vs. pre-molded-figure analogy, what inheritance really gives you (code reuse, polymorphism, specialization), what composition really is (holding and delegating), the two flavors composition/aggregation, the is-a vs has-a sentence test with the classic Penguin/FlyingBird and…
A software architect draws the map. But a map drawn by someone who never walks the streets tends to be wrong in ways nobody notices until it is too late. This thirteen-chapter guide unpacks what “staying hands-on” really means, what happens when architects stop coding entirely (the ivory-tower drift), the…
Not every team has to invent the wheel from scratch. Somewhere, someone has already solved a very similar problem — and written down how they did it. That written-down wisdom is called a reference architecture. This guide unpacks what it really is, how it differs from a solution architecture, what’s…
Drawing a good architecture is one thing. Making sure that dozens of teams, over many years, actually stick to it — that’s a completely different challenge. This guide unpacks architectural governance — what it really is, how it differs from architecture design, its four pillars (principles, standards, review and approval,…
The code can tell you what a system does. It almost never tells you why it was built that way, or what would break if you changed it. That missing “why” is exactly what architecture documentation is for. This guide unpacks what it really is, why it exists, why code…