Two-Phase Commit (2PC) is one of the oldest and most fundamental protocols in distributed systems....
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Search across 107 posts, 16 explainers, and 56 topics
Cloudflare Outage December 2025: A Nil Value Exception That Lurked for Years
A 25-minute disruption affected 28% of HTTP traffic globally triggered by a security fix and exposed by a killswitch that had never been tested on 'execute' actions
On December 5, 2025, Cloudflare experienced another global outage, just 17 days after the November...
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Modular Monolith: The Architecture Most Teams Actually Need
Why microservices might be overkill and how to build systems that actually scale
Microservices aren’t always the answer. For most teams, they bring network latency, distributed debugging nightmares,...
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Server-Sent Events: One-Way Real-Time Streaming Over HTTP
The overlooked middle ground between polling and WebSockets
You need to push live updates from server to client. Stock prices. Notifications. Live scores....
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Long Polling Explained: Build Real-Time Apps Without WebSockets
The battle-tested technique that powers notifications when persistent connections fail
You’re building a notification system. Users need to see new alerts the moment they arrive....
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How Stock Brokers Push 1 Million Price Updates Per Second to Your Screen
The engineering behind real-time stock prices that move faster than you can blink
Open any stock trading app. Tap on a stock. Watch the price flicker green, then...
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JSON, YAML, TOML, or HOCON: Choosing the Right Format Before It Breaks Production
Why Docker uses YAML, Rust picks TOML, and Akka chose HOCON over JSON
Docker uses YAML. Rust uses TOML. REST APIs use JSON. Akka uses HOCON. Each format...
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Cloudflare Global Outage: How a Database Permission Change Broke the Internet
A 6-hour disruption took down ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Dropbox, and millions of sites worldwide - here's the technical breakdown and lessons for developers
On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a global outage that took down ChatGPT, X (formerly...
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Heartbeat: How Distributed Systems Know You're Still Alive
The simple signal that prevents your servers from becoming digital zombies
It’s 2 AM. Your database cluster is running smoothly. Then, one server freezes. Not a...
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Your JSON is Costing You Thousands: Why TOON Might Save Your Budget
How a simple format change can reduce LLM API costs by 40-50%
Companies using GPT for product recommendations are seeing monthly API bills reach $15,000-$20,000. Most of...
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Stop Blocking Your Paying Customers: Build a Smart Rate Limiter
How to protect your API without blocking legitimate users
It’s 3 AM. Your phone buzzes. “API is down.” You check the logs and see...
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How Shopify Powers 5 Million Stores Without Breaking a Sweat
Inside the architecture that handles Black Friday at massive scale
You launch a small t-shirt store on Shopify at 9 AM. By noon, you’ve made...
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WebTransport: The Protocol That Fixes What's Broken in WebSockets
How HTTP/3 and QUIC are changing real-time communication on the web
You’re building a multiplayer game. Players are chatting, shooting, moving around. Your WebSocket connection works...
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