What is idempotence and how can you use it properly — Idempotence is a topic that can be both simple and hard. Here, we start from simple with a trivial use case in a single-state application. Then we’ll go deep, to discuss the most complicated use case for building a highly reliable system with multiple states. What’s Idempotence Let’s start from Wikipedia: “Idempotence…

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…

And what to focus on in your preparations — A while back, we discussed coding and system design interviews. If you haven’t, feel free to take a look here: Why Are Coding Interviews Getting So Hard? Why Is System Design So Hard? Today, let’s review and discuss the last category in this series — behavior interviews. I am a…

Today, we are parting away with 13% of us. It is a wednesday. Wednesdays are usually noisy. Since it is supposedly no meeting day. People tend to send more chat messages, open more pull requests, and write more posts. But today is especially quiet. This is the 2nd time that…

Six questions to ask during project planning — Planning season is around the corner, and we just had an offsite with the team. There were a lot of fruitful discussions, and we ended up with a whole bunch of project ideas we can work on. On my flight back, I started thinking, how do we evaluate these? How…

Capacity management in layman’s terms with a fictional story of Walter’s Bakery — Similar to my previous one about how to “design a coffee shop,” here is one about “operating a bakery.” Unlike the previous article, this one contains less technical jargon but more background about the characters. But regardless, it highlights the challenges of resource management in a large-scale distributed system. If…

Have you ever deal with tree structure in your career as an engineer? Is there a time when you want to leave some comments about the tree…

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…