A starting point to design a large-scale distributed system — Though I am a software engineer, I always dream about opening a coffee shop one day. A while ago, I wrote about compilation from the perspective of two people ordering poutines. Today, let’s talked about system design from the perspective of a coffee shop owner, Joe. System Design Jargon We’ll cover these system…

A step-by-step guide — Background and Introduction RPC vs JSON vs SOAP Once I learn about gRPC and Thrift, it is hard to go back to using the more transitional JSON-based REST API or SOAP API. The two well-known RPC frameworks, gRPC, and Thrift, have many similarities. The former originates from Google while the latter originates from Facebook. Both of them are…

And how should you deal with it? — A while back, I wrote a post about Why Coding Interviews Are Getting So Hard? Similar to coding problems, system design is also an important part of the interview process, especially when you are interviewing for any backend system roles. Arguably, system design is more important than coding. Coding interviews…

What is rate-limiting and how to use it properly — After launching your web service, how do you protect it from overloading? This article will discuss options to protect your services with a common technique called rate limiting. There are many different reasons why we want to block requests at times. To name a few: We want to prevent noisy…

Should we have them? — Engineer titles roughly represent how much experience an engineer has and also their responsibility and role in the team. Here are some commonly seen engineer titles: Software Engineer Senior Software Engineer Staff Software Engineer Principle Software Engineer I had an opportunity to work in a few different environments that handle…

And can it get better? — There are three types of technical interviews: coding system design behavior The coding interview is the most essential to software engineers. For entry-level software engineers, they may face 3–5 rounds of interviews. Each round of interviews ranges from 45 minutes to 1 hour, and they are most likely all coding…

Build a custom log formatter for Sublime Text using Python — Sublime Text is a clean, fast, and lightweight text editor. Its rich support for plugins also makes it extendable and powerful. In today’s tutorial, we’ll look into how to create a plugin of our own. Plugin Idea —A Custom Log Formatter Imagine we have a logger that logs all the API requests and responses. …

Tap into the power of Google Drive — Google APIs are a huge umbrella. Check out the almost 200 entries from the Google API explorer. Among all these APIs, some of popular ones include: Google Drive, Gmail, Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage, etc. Today, let’s take a look at what it takes to integrate the Google Drive API…