System Design
Two million games, one running clock
Plate two: two players sharing one truth while the clock runs, and why the bravest thing a real-time system can do is stop.
Resilience
Architecture
The anatomy of a resilient system
Servers fail every day. Whether that becomes an outage depends far more on the organisation than the infrastructure.
System Design
A payment system that refuses to guess
The second in the series: a system where the dangerous failure is not downtime but doubt, and where the guardrails exist to stop the machine resolving that doubt with optimism.
System Design
Designing a URL shortener for its worst day
Resilience is a design input, not a deep dive at the end. The first in a series: the smallest system everyone knows, designed around the question of what is allowed to die.