architecture GitHub Weekly: Architecture & Infra Tools Worth a Look (September 14 – September 20, 2026) josedacruz, September 21, 2026September 21, 2026 TL;DR: This week we’re setting aside the usual overall-trending list to spotlight repos tagged around architecture, system design, diagramming, and infrastructure-as-code — the stuff most relevant to readers thinking about how systems are put together. The standout theme: a cluster of new “diagram-as-code” tools built specifically as skills for AI… Continue Reading
architecture Designing a Real-Time Leaderboard: Why Sorted Sets Beat a SQL ORDER BY at Scale josedacruz, September 16, 2026September 16, 2026 TL;DR: A leaderboard looks like a simple feature — sort some scores, show the top N — but a plain SQL table falls over once you have millions of players updating scores in real time. The fix isn’t a bigger database, it’s a different data structure: a sorted set (like… Continue Reading
architecture The Saga Pattern: How to Undo a Transaction That Spans Five Services josedacruz, September 16, 2026September 16, 2026 TL;DR: A saga is how you handle a “transaction” that spans multiple services, since you can’t wrap them all in one database commit. Instead of one atomic rollback, you run a chain of local steps and, if something downstream fails, you undo the earlier steps with separate “compensating” actions. It’s… Continue Reading
architecture Designing a Webhook Delivery System: Why Your Retries Need an Idempotency Key josedacruz, September 13, 2026September 13, 2026 TL;DR: A webhook is just an HTTP POST your system sends to someone else’s server when something happens, but “just an HTTP POST” hides a lot of hard problems. Networks drop packets, receivers time out, and retries create duplicates — so a webhook delivery system that actually works needs retries… Continue Reading
architecture Designing a Distributed Counter: Why Global Counts Don’t Scale josedacruz, September 10, 2026September 10, 2026 TL;DR: A single database row that stores a count (likes, views, votes) works fine until enough people hit it at once — then it becomes a bottleneck that slows down or breaks your whole app. The fix isn’t a bigger database, it’s splitting the count into several pieces that get… Continue Reading
architecture Designing a Distributed Job Scheduler: Why “Just Use Cron” Doesn’t Scale josedacruz, August 26, 2026August 26, 2026 TL;DR: A single cron job looks simple until the server it lives on goes down, and “just add a second cron server” quietly turns into a duplicate-execution bug. A real distributed job scheduler needs a shared source of truth for what’s due, a way for exactly one worker to claim… Continue Reading
architecture The Rule of Least Power: Why the Boring Technology Choice Usually Wins josedacruz, August 19, 2026August 19, 2026 TL;DR: When you’re picking a tool, a database, or a way of solving a problem, the option with the most features and the most flexibility isn’t automatically the right choice. The Rule of Least Power says: pick the least powerful tool that still gets the job done, because less powerful… Continue Reading
architecture The Distributed Monolith: When Your Microservices Still Deploy as One App josedacruz, August 18, 2026August 18, 2026 TL;DR: Splitting a monolith into microservices doesn’t automatically get you the benefits people promise — independent deploys, one team’s mistake not taking down everyone else, services that scale on their own. If your new services still call each other synchronously, share a database, or all have to deploy together, you’ve… Continue Reading
architecture Designing a Rate Limiter That Survives a Flash Sale: Token Bucket vs Sliding Window josedacruz, August 13, 2026August 13, 2026 TL;DR: A simple “count requests per minute” rate limiter looks fine in testing but can let through double the traffic right at the boundary between two time windows — exactly when a flash sale or a bot swarm is most likely to hit you. Token bucket and sliding window algorithms… Continue Reading
architecture How ‘Seen’ Receipts Actually Work: Avoiding the Write Amplification Trap josedacruz, August 9, 2026August 9, 2026 TL;DR: A “seen” checkmark looks like the simplest feature in a chat app, but the naive way to build it — storing a read flag for every message and every recipient — creates a database write explosion that gets worse as your group chats grow. The fix most real apps… Continue Reading