Interactive walkthroughs

Three hard problems,
worked all the way through.

Each one states a problem, then builds the answer step by step — requirements, capacity arithmetic, the naive design, the point where it breaks, and the fix — on a board you can reach into and rearrange.

  1. 01

    A globally distributed
    key-value store

    Consistent hashing, virtual nodes, tunable quorums, hinted handoff and anti-entropy. The DynamoDB and Cassandra class of problem.

    • Consistent hashing
    • Quorum tuning
    • Merkle repair
    Open →
  2. 02

    Planet-scale
    video streaming

    Chunked parallel transcoding, bitrate ladders, CDN hierarchy and cache economics, adaptive bitrate. The Netflix and YouTube class of problem.

    • Transcode fan-out
    • Cache economics
    • Adaptive bitrate
    Open →
  3. 03

    Real-time
    ride dispatch

    Geospatial indexing, k-ring search, batched matching, surge feedback and stateful sharding. The Uber and Lyft class of problem.

    • Hex indexing
    • Batched matching
    • Shard failover
    Open →