P1 on An observer's log

Real-time & Fan-out Patterns

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — how to push updates to many recipients; classic interview problem

The Three Pillars

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — the foundational framework for observability

Backend for Frontend (BFF)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — solves the “one API doesn’t fit all clients” problem

Feature Flags

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — decouple deployment from release; essential for large systems

Index Trade-offs (B-Tree vs LSM)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — DDIA Ch3 deep knowledge; shows understanding of storage engine internals

Leaderless Replication

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — Dynamo-style replication; no single leader, quorum-based

RED & USE Methods

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — systematic approaches to choosing what to measure

Distributed Tracing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — following a request across service boundaries

Transport Protocols

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — understanding HTTP/2 is essential for gRPC; WebSocket vs SSE comes up in real-time designs

Web-gRPC Proxy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — decoupling internal gRPC from external REST via a stateless proxy

Write-Ahead Logging

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — the durability mechanism underlying every serious database

Zero-Downtime Migrations

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — underrated staff-level signal; how to change schemas on a live system

CQRS

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — Command Query Responsibility Segregation; separate read and write models

Double-Entry Ledger

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — the accounting pattern underlying every financial system

Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — Peter Deutsch’s eight fallacies; useful as a shortcut reference in interviews

Raft Consensus

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — the understandable consensus algorithm; know conceptually, not implementation details

API Versioning Strategies

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — how you evolve public APIs without breaking consumers

Event Sourcing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — store events, not state; the append-only log as source of truth

Multi-tenancy Patterns

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — directly relevant to Stripe (multi-tenant SaaS platform)

Load Balancing Patterns

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — distributing traffic across service instances

Batch & Stream Processing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — two paradigms for processing large volumes of data

Outbox Pattern

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — solves the dual-write problem; critical for exactly-once in event-driven systems

Bulkhead Isolation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — isolating failures so one component’s problems don’t sink the ship

Ordering & Causality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🟠 P1 — how distributed systems reason about “what happened before what”