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Deep Dives

Technical deep-dives on algorithms, system design, networking, and distributed systems — explained from first principles.

Top Reads

Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store

Amazon's decentralized key-value store — consistent hashing, vector clocks, sloppy quorums, hinted handoff, and gossip.

Jul 11, 202645 min read

HTTP/2 Deep Dive

Binary framing, multiplexed streams, HPACK compression, server push, and flow control over one TCP connection.

Mar 16, 202620 min read

SSL / TLS Explained

The TLS handshake, TLS 1.3, certificates & CAs, symmetric vs asymmetric encryption, cipher suites, and mTLS.

Mar 20, 202625 min read

Time & Space Complexity Analysis

Big-O, recurrences, the Master Theorem, Akra–Bazzi, and amortized analysis — with worked methods.

Mar 19, 202630 min read
Latest ArticlesView all →

HTTP/3 Deep Dive

HTTP/3 swaps the transport to QUIC over UDP — no TCP head-of-line blocking, 1-RTT/0-RTT handshakes, and connection migration.

Aug 22, 202612 min read

Netflix Hollow — Deep Dive

How Netflix Hollow replicates a read-only, in-memory dataset from one producer to many consumers — snapshots, deltas, and ordinal-based columnar storage.

Jun 21, 202635 min read

Cassandra Storage Engine Internals

Why Cassandra uses LSM trees instead of B-trees — memtables, SSTables, the commit log, compaction, bloom filters, and the read/write paths.

Jul 12, 202650 min read

How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages

How Discord moved from Cassandra to ScyllaDB to store trillions of messages — GC pain, hot partitions, and a shard-per-core C++ rewrite.

Jul 8, 202622 min read

How Discord Stores Billions of Messages

How Discord scaled message storage to billions on Cassandra — data modeling, partitioning by bucket, and the operational lessons learned.

Jul 5, 202610 min read

Consistency in Cassandra

Tunable consistency in Cassandra — quorums, R + W > N, read repair, and consistency levels for different correctness needs.

Jun 29, 202620 min read

HTTP/1 Deep Dive

HTTP fundamentals, the TCP relationship, keep-alive, pipelining, HOL blocking, domain sharding, and protocol overhead.

Mar 31, 202620 min read

Data Flow in TCP

TCP flow control, slow-start, congestion avoidance, the bandwidth-delay product, connection reuse, and performance optimization.

Mar 25, 202630 min read

Building Blocks of TCP

OSI model, TCP/IP layers, TCP properties, 3-way & 4-way handshakes, keepalive, SYN flood & mitigation, and TCP vs UDP.

Mar 22, 202625 min read

SSL / TLS Explained

HTTP vs HTTPS, the TLS handshake, TLS 1.3, certificates & CAs, symmetric vs asymmetric encryption, cipher suites, mTLS, and best practices.

Mar 20, 202625 min read

Time & Space Complexity Analysis

Asymptotic analysis, Big-O, recurrences, the Master Theorem, Akra–Bazzi, and amortized analysis — with worked methods.

Mar 19, 202630 min read

HTTP/2 Deep Dive

Binary frames, multiplexed streams, HPACK compression, server push, and flow control over a single TCP connection.

Mar 16, 202620 min read

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