How real systems work, one idea at a time.
Each post takes one of our @streamingyard967 reels and tells the full story, with worked examples, code and the source. New terms? See the streaming glossary.
Database hot spots explained: why one shard is on fire
You split your database across ten servers and one still melts. How partitioning by date, by hash and by celebrity post creates hot spots, and how to fix it.
Partitioning · 4 min read · Read →More posts
Backpressure explained: where do the extra messages go?
Your server handles 100 messages a second and 1,000 just arrived. What to do when a producer outruns a consumer, and how Kafka-style logs keep order.
Write skew explained: how two doctors went off call at once
Two doctors tap “go off call” at the same second and the hospital has zero. How snapshot isolation allows write skew and phantoms, and two ways to fix it.
How Twitter's timeline fan-out works
Twitter served 300,000 home-timeline requests a second. Why reading on demand melted, how fan-out on write fixed it, and the hybrid that handles celebrities.