Category: System Design
Relational vs NoSQL
A beginner-friendly, complete guide to relational vs NoSQL databases: what each one really is, how they store and scale data, the CAP theorem, ACID vs BASE, real-world architectures, and a practical decision checklist for picking the right database for your system.
PUT vs PATCH: Guide to HTTP Update Methods
A ground-up, beginner-friendly walkthrough of the two HTTP update methods everyone confuses — how they work internally, why idempotency matters, how JSON Patch and JSON Merge Patch differ, and how Netflix, Stripe, GitHub, and Kubernetes actually use them in production.
Polling vs. Webhooks
A ground-up guide to the two fundamental strategies for keeping software systems in sync: polling (the consumer repeatedly asks the producer for updates) and webhooks (the producer notifies the consumer the moment something happens). Traces the history from 1960s scheduled batch jobs, through 1990s HTTP polling and 2005 AJAX long…
What Is a Distributed Cache Used For?
A ground-up, beginner-to-production guide to distributed caches and what they are actually used for. Covers the history from 1960s CPU caches through the 1990s single-server web caches to the 2003 launch of Memcached and 2009 launch of Redis, and today’s use in nearly every large-scale application. Explains the four pressures…
Why Might Edge Computing Matter for Certain Architectures?
A ground-up, beginner-to-production guide to edge computing and why it matters for certain software architectures. Covers the history from 1990s CDNs through the 2000s cloud boom, the 2010s IoT explosion, the 2015-2018 formalization of the term, the 5G / Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) era, and today’s treatment of edge as…
What Is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?
A ground-up, beginner-to-production guide to the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture pattern. Covers the history from 1970s point-to-point integration through EAI hubs, the golden age of SOA and products like IBM WebSphere ESB, Oracle Service Bus, MuleSoft, TIBCO BusinessWorks, and Apache Camel, up to the modern shift toward microservices, API…
What Is a Downside of GraphQL?
A ground-up, beginner-to-production guide that specifically answers “what is a downside of GraphQL?” Covers the history from Facebook 2012 through Apollo Federation, the two REST problems GraphQL was built to solve (over-fetching and under-fetching), core vocabulary (schema, SDL, queries, mutations, subscriptions, resolvers, type system), request lifecycle from parsing through resolver…