System Design
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Software Development
Rate-Limiting Algorithms: Token Bucket Against Sliding Window
Every public API eventually meets a client that sends too much, too fast. A rate limiter is the bouncer at…
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Software Development
Consistent Hashing: The 1997 Paper Quietly Running the Internet
Dynamo, Cassandra, and every major CDN route requests through an idea from a 1997 theory paper. Almost nobody using it…
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Software Development
The Boundary Between Coupling and Cohesion: Why Low Coupling Alone Doesn’t Make a Good Architecture
Coupling gets all the credit in architecture reviews. Cohesion, its quieter counterpart, is what actually decides whether that low-coupling win…
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Software Development
Beyond the CAP Theorem: What PACELC Tells Us That CAP Never Could
Why the CAP theorem is frequently misunderstood, and how the PACELC model gives teams a more honest framework for database…
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Software Development
The Hidden Complexity of Schema Evolution: How Data Outlives the Code That Created It
A theoretical framework for thinking about backward and forward compatibility across Avro, Protobuf, JSON, and relational schemas — before a…
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Software Development
A Guide to Designing APIs for AI Agents in the Age of AI
AI agents are changing how modern software systems are designed and consumed. Unlike traditional applications that rely on predictable, human-driven…
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Software Development
Complexity Has a Ratchet: Why Software Systems Almost Never Get Simpler Over Time and What That Implies for How We Design Them
Every abstraction layer was solving a real problem. Every configuration flag handled a genuine edge case. Every service boundary separated…
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Software Development
Beyond CAP: Why the PACELC Model Is a Better Framework for Database Decisions in 2026
CAP is one of the most cited and most misunderstood results in distributed systems. Daniel Abadi’s PACELC model extends it…
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Software Development
Consistent Hashing: The Algorithm That Makes Distributed Caches and Databases Actually Scale
Theory, variants, and where it breaks — from the 1997 Karger et al. paper to virtual nodes in DynamoDB, Cassandra,…
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