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Practical guides to .NET, databases and distributed systems. Newest articles first.
Showing 1–12 of 107 articles.
How to Scale Likes, Comments and View Counts Without Hot Database Rows
Read articleHow GitHub Stores Code, Commits and Repository History
Learn how Git objects, branches and packfiles work alongside GitHub's hosting and application data, with examples of pushes, replication and recovery.
Capacity Planning for System Design: How Many Servers Do You Need for Millions of Users?
Read articleHow Notion Stores Pages, Blocks and Databases
Explore Notion's block model and PostgreSQL architecture, with practical examples of page structure, permissions, workspace sharding and collaborative edits.
How Figma Stores Design Files and Version History
Understand Figma's published multiplayer storage design, including structured files, checkpoints, journals, offline edits and recoverable version history.
How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
Learn how Discord organises message storage and search, with clear examples of time buckets, hot partitions, queues, retries and reliable chat history.
How Pinterest Stores Pins, Boards and Saved Content
Explore Pinterest's published MySQL design, with practical examples of objects, board mappings, caching, image references, sharding and reliable saves.
System Design Interview: Design a Hotel Booking Platform
Read articleHow Facebook Stores Data: Posts, Friendships and the Social Graph
Explore Facebook's published storage architecture, from social graphs and MySQL to caching, sharding and consistency, with practical engineering examples.
How Slack Stores and Searches Years of Channel History
Explore Slack's published storage and search designs, including Vitess, message indexing, channel permissions, caching and the lifecycle of conversation history.