Amazon Dynamo Explained: The Database That Refused to Reject Writes

A deep dive into Amazon's Dynamo paper: consistent hashing, vector clocks, sloppy quorums, Merkle trees, and the design philosophy that inspired…

Jul 20 • Rahul Dhar

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Harness Engineering vs. Loop Engineering

Why reliable AI agents need both, and why confusing them leads to brittle autonomous systems

Jul 7 • Rahul Dhar

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How AWS Made 10 GB Lambda Container Images Feel Like 250 MB ZIP Files

A deep dive into the architecture behind on-demand container loading, explaining how AWS uses chunk-level deduplication, convergent encryption, and lazy…

Jul 4 • Rahul Dhar

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June 2026

The Bottleneck Wasn't Code. It Was Context.

How I built an engineering workspace that reduced coordination overhead and made engineering work feel cumulative.

Jun 15 • Rahul Dhar

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Google MapReduce Architecture Explained: Lessons Every Backend Engineer Should Learn

The paper that made failure, scheduling, and scalability someone else's problem

Jun 14 • Rahul Dhar

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October 2025

The Secret to Netflix’s Lightning-Fast Counters

How distributed systems, batching, and eventual consistency make millions of increments possible every second.

Oct 26, 2025 • Rahul Dhar

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Inside Netflix’s 100× Speed Boost: The Maestro Rewrite

Why Netflix ditched polling and stateless workers to build a lightning-fast, event-driven workflow engine.

Oct 11, 2025 • Rahul Dhar

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September 2025

Why Being 'Busy' Doesn't Mean Being Productive

It all started with what I thought was a "quick question."

Sep 25, 2025 • Rahul Dhar

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How to be more assertive at your workplace

Finding the balance between silence and aggression at work

Sep 15, 2025 • Rahul Dhar

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A Layman’s Guide to Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) with Google Pub/Sub

A guide to designing, and operating DLQs in production grade Pub/Sub systems

Sep 11, 2025 • Rahul Dhar

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Why “Just Publish to Kafka” Almost Sank Our Service

How we went from 4-5 escalations per week to zero by adopting a simple but powerful pattern.

Sep 7, 2025 • Rahul Dhar

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August 2025

Beyond the DLQ: What Really Happens After a Message Fails

How to transform Dead Letter Queues into a source of resilience and learning

Aug 30, 2025 • Rahul Dhar

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