Tag: System Design
What my toddler taught me about fault tolerance
Reliability isn’t perfection—it’s predictability, even in chaos. - Carl Eubanks, The 22nd Time He Told Me He Wanted Veggie Straws On Tuesday (2025). Now, before I get into anything, there’s some important context I need to provide. What are veggie s...
Carl Eubanks
The bathroom scale and the myth of scalability: Why most systems fail at rush hour—not at rest
Most systems don’t break because of a missing feature. They break because they weren’t designed to survive growth, chaos, or time—mainly chaos. That’s the first thing Designing Data-Intensive Applications wants you to understand. Chapter 1 isn’t abou...
Carl Eubanks
Building a notification orchestrator: a decision log
This isn’t a copy‑paste tutorial. It’s a behind‑the‑scenes look at why I chose a specific shape—hexagonal micro‑orchestrator on SNS → SQS—for a cross‑channel notification pipeline, and the trade‑offs I wrestled with along the way. Problem Statement ...
Carl Eubanks
Design bit.ly
For each portion, I’ll regurgitate the feedback I received. Each system design interview is different, so it’s interesting to see how hellointerview has tailored their AI feedback system. Requirements Functional requirements Users should be able to ...
Carl Eubanks
Caching: The bikini bottom marathon
What is caching? Caching is the practice of storing something in a location from which it can be quickly retrieved, thereby speeding up future accesses. It's not always permanent--it's more of a short-term memory for whatever you might need really so...
Carl Eubanks