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How tech giants architect at scale β distributed systems, database choices, caching strategies, and the infrastructure behind billions of requests
In 2012, Twitter's home timeline was dying under its own success. Every refresh triggered 3,000 database queries. Then one engineer proposed something crazy: cache the entire timeline in RAM.
You press play. 200 milliseconds later, audio floods your headphones. What just happened? The story of how a Swedish 'pirate' built the architecture that delivers 100 million songs to 600 million users β and why paying artists fractions of a penny forced the most elegant infrastructure decisions in tech.
When Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't just buying a messaging app β he was buying the most radically efficient engineering organization in Silicon Valley history. Here's how they did it.
You're editing cell B4. Your colleague is editing cell B4. You both hit 'enter' at the exact same millisecond. Neither of you loses a character. How is that even possible?
On January 28, 2021, Robinhood's order matching engine processed 3 billion messages in 90 minutes β and collapsed. Here's why architecting a stock trading platform is the most unforgiving system design challenge in tech.
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg's PHP app served 1,200 Harvard students. By 2024, it served 3 billion users with 99.999% uptime. This is the system design story of the most scaled social network ever built.
In 2008, three broke designers rented air mattresses to strangers. By 2023, their platform handled 100 million bookings a year. This is the system design story behind every 'Book Now' button.