Networking & APIs System Designs
Worked Networking & APIs system design walkthroughs: the requirements, the trade-offs, real numbers and the component choices behind each design.
API Design Best Practices: Versioning, Pagination, Errors, and Idempotency
A deep-dive into production-grade REST API design covering versioning strategies, cursor-based pagination, structured error envelopes, and idempotency keys with real trade-offs.
Networking & APIs · intermediate · 12 min read
API Gateway: Routing, Auth, Rate Limiting, and Aggregation
A deep dive into API Gateway architecture covering request routing, authentication, rate limiting, and response aggregation with real component choices and trade-offs.
Networking & APIs · intermediate · 12 min read
Checksums and Data Integrity in Distributed Storage and Transfer
How distributed systems detect and recover from silent data corruption using checksums, hashing, and integrity verification at every layer of storage and transfer.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
Content Delivery Networks: Push vs Pull, Caching, and Invalidation
How CDNs move content closer to users, when to push vs pull assets, and how cache invalidation works at scale — with real numbers and trade-offs.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
Domain Name System (DNS): Resolution, Caching, TTLs, and Routing Policies
How DNS translates hostnames to IPs, where caching lives, how TTLs control propagation speed, and how routing policies enable geo, failover, and weighted traffic.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
Forward Proxy vs Reverse Proxy
Understand how forward and reverse proxies differ in placement, trust, and responsibility — with real configs, failure modes, and interview-ready trade-offs.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
Heartbeats and Health Checks: Detecting Failure in Distributed Systems
A deep dive into how distributed systems detect node failures using heartbeats, health checks, and gossip protocols — with real trade-offs, data models, and failure scenarios.
Networking & APIs · intermediate · 12 min read
HTTP and HTTPS: Methods, Status Codes, Headers, Keep-Alive, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3
A deep-dive into how HTTP works end-to-end: request/response mechanics, TLS, connection reuse, multiplexing, and the protocol evolution from 1.1 to HTTP/3 over QUIC.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
Load Balancing: L4 vs L7, Algorithms, Health Checks, and Sticky Sessions
A deep dive into how load balancers distribute traffic, the difference between L4 and L7 routing, balancing algorithms, health probing, and session affinity trade-offs.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
Rate Limiting: Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Sliding Window, and Distributed Limits
A deep dive into four rate-limiting algorithms, their data models, distributed coordination patterns, and the real trade-offs engineers face when protecting APIs at scale.
Networking & APIs · intermediate · 12 min read
REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC: Choosing the Right API Protocol
A deep comparison of REST, GraphQL, and gRPC covering wire format, latency, tooling, and when to pick each for real production systems.
Networking & APIs · intermediate · 12 min read
TCP vs UDP: Choosing the Right Transport Protocol
A deep-dive into TCP and UDP mechanics, trade-offs, and when to use each in real systems — from web APIs to game servers to video streaming.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
The OSI Model and IP Addressing for Backend Engineers
A practical walkthrough of the seven OSI layers and IP addressing fundamentals, grounded in real protocols, port numbers, and the trade-offs that matter when building or debugging distributed systems.
Networking & APIs · beginner · 12 min read
Webhooks: Delivery Guarantees, Retries, Signing, and Idempotency
A deep-dive into building reliable webhook infrastructure: at-least-once delivery, exponential backoff retries, HMAC request signing, and idempotent consumer design.
Networking & APIs · intermediate · 12 min read
WebSockets vs Long Polling vs Server-Sent Events
A deep comparison of the three main real-time web communication patterns—when to use each, how to scale them, and where they break under load.
Networking & APIs · intermediate · 12 min read