Articles
Notes on backend architecture, performance work, and the WordPress and Laravel systems I build.
12 min readThe auth service is down and users are still logging in: how stateless auth works
A backend interview question with a precise answer — the auth service sits on the issuance path, not the verification path. How locally verified signatures, JWKS caching and asymmetric keys keep requests flowing, exactly which operations are already broken, the revocation you traded away, and how to design the degradation deliberately.
Intermediate- Authentication
- Security
- Reliability
- System Design
14 min readThe cache scheduled the outage: stampedes, avalanches and how to survive midnight
A backend interview classic — 10,000 rps in front of a 1,000 rps database, one cache, one shared TTL, and a database that dies at 00:00:00. What the failure is actually called, why it does not recover on its own, and the full ladder of fixes: TTL jitter, single-flight coalescing, stale-while-revalidate, probabilistic early expiry and load shedding.
Intermediate- Caching
- Reliability
- System Design
- Redis
10 min readOne movie, 190 countries, zero buffering: how Netflix answers the interview
A system-design case study of the classic Netflix question — 120 million simultaneous streams, 4–15 Mbps each, no buffering. We do the napkin math, show why a data centre cannot serve it, and walk through Open Connect, adaptive bitrate and the control-plane / data-plane split that actually make it work.
Intermediate- System Design
- Networking
- CDN
- Streaming