System Design

I've been working like a contractor, full stack engineer or b2b contractor in the past several years. The important subjects of my daily work are:

• System design
• Web Development - Scalability
• Distributed Systems
• Real-Time and Streaming
• Microservices and monolith
• Automation testing
• Fault-Tolerant Systems

Video presentations:

• Scalability Web Development by David Malan

  Lecture items: Web Hosts, VPSes, Vertical Scaling, Horizontal Scaling, PHP Acceleration, PHP Accelerators, Load Balancing, Load Balancing with BIND, Sticky Sessions, Load Balancers, Caching

  Video: Scalability Web Development by David Malan

• Distributed Systems in One Lesson by Tim Berglund

  Short info: Normally simple tasks like running a program or storing and retrieving data become much more complicated when we start to do them on collections of computers, rather than single machines. Distributed systems has become a key architectural concern, and affects everything a program would normally do—giving us enormous power, but at the cost of increased complexity as well.

  Video: Distributed Systems in One Lesson by Tim Berglund

• Distributed Programming for a Decentralized World - Mark Miller

  Short info: To reach our goal of bringing the world economy into the decentralized world, we need to improve the developer experience. Current approaches to smart contract and dApp development are too hazardous, non-composable, use unfamiliar languages, and are subject to single-chain lock-in. We introduce the Agoric stack for creating safe, composable and interoperable smart contracts.

  Video: Agoric + Protocol Labs // Part 1 - Distributed Programming for a Decentralized World - Mark Miller

• Streaming a Million Likes/Second

  Short info: Akhilesh Gupta does a technical deep-dive into how LinkedIn uses the Play/Akka Framework and a scalable distributed system to enable live interactions like likes/comments at massive scale at extremely low costs across multiple data centers.

  Video: Streaming a Million Likes/Second: Real-Time Interactions on Live Video

• Building Scalable, Highly Concurrent and Fault-Tolerant Systems

  Short info: The skills of building Scalable, Highly Concurrent and Fault-Tolerant Systems are becoming increasingly important in our new world of Cloud Computing, multi-core processors, Big Data and Real-Time Web. Unfortunately, many people are still doing it wrong; using the wrong tools, techniques, habits and ideas. In this talk we will look at some of the most common (and some not so common but superior) practices; what works - what doesn’t work - and why.

  Video: Building Scalable, Highly Concurrent and Fault-Tolerant Systems: Lessons Learned

• Microservices - Martin Fowler

  Lecture items: Monolith vs. microservices, Definition of microservices, Characteristics of microservices, Componentization via services, Organized around business capabilities, Decentralized data management, Infrastructure automation, Design for failure, Are microservices just SOA?, How big is a microservice?, Monolith vs. microservices

  Video: Microservices • Martin Fowler • GOTO 2014

• What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber to 1000 Services

  Short info: To Keep up with Uber’s growth, we’ve embraced microservices in a big way. This has led to an explosion of new services, crossing over 1,000 production services in early March 2016. Along the way we’ve learned a lot, and if we had to do it all over again

  Video: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber to 1000 Services • Matt Ranney • GOTO 2016

• Kraken's migration to Rust microservices

  Short info: Marco and Rob talk about Kraken’s migration to Rust microservices and the significant performance improvements, massive drop in memory usage, and substantial reductions in AWS spending it brought along. They also emphasize the stability advancements that Rust provides, and Rob highlights that errors like null pointer exceptions that were frequent in Java are no longer possible in Rust. Finally, they discuss updates in Rust’s web development ecosystem and actix specifically, and Rob shares his view on how improvements in the language and framework space will eventually lead to a future where web development in Rust can be as approachable as development with e.g. express.js.

  Video: Kraken's migration to Rust microservices - with Rob Ede

• Building reliable systems with DoorDash

  A few key themes: Working on self-driving cars at Uber, The danger of optimizing for the wrong metric, Did we over-rotate on microservices?, Who needs access to Kubernetes?, The most important thing to know before adopting microservices, Chaos engineering vs fault injection, What does it mean for DoorDash when a system goes down?, How DoorDash makes systems more reliable, How CockroachDB is used at DoorDash

  Video: Building reliable systems with DoorDash's Matt Ranney