Writing on System design
Articles on System design from Tauseef Fayyaz: practical writing on engineering, AI and tech careers, drawn from leading a team and mentoring engineers.
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5 posts tagged “system design”
Sixteen Things That Break a Backend, and What Prevents Each
Backend engineering is taught as frameworks and turns out to be almost entirely about what happens when the database is slow, when the same request arrives twice, or when a downstream service stops answering without saying so. None of it is deep, all of it is invisible until it happens to you at an unpleasant hour. Sixteen situations and their usual answers.
The Defaults I Would Learn First as a Software Engineer
Every roadmap for learning software engineering is the same technology list in a different order, and it tells you nothing about what to do when you are sitting in front of an unclear requirement on a Wednesday afternoon. Fourteen situations you will keep meeting, paired with the move that is usually right, from prototyping a vague requirement to blaming the system rather than the person.
Microservices Practices That Actually Keep Them Workable
Most microservices advice describes how to run them well and skips the decision that causes the most damage, which is splitting too early. The practices that matter once you genuinely need services: boundaries drawn around business capability, data ownership, failure handling, idempotency, events over synchronous calls, tracing and contract testing.
A Learning Roadmap for System Design
System design is the subject people put off longest, because every resource assumes you already know the vocabulary. A four stage sequence that fixes the order: vocabulary, then data, then services talking to each other, then real systems, with how long each stage takes, how to know you are done with it, and the mistake of collecting concepts instead of using them.
The Fundamentals Worth Learning as a Software Engineer
Frameworks are the fastest moving and least valuable part of what you know. This is the layer underneath: how a computer runs your code, data structures as trade offs, complexity at conversational depth, storage, networks, concurrency, version control, testing as a design tool, and the two skills engineers skip that decide how far they get.
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