The Pragmatic Tech Lead

The Pragmatic Tech Lead

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Deep Dives

The Secret to Netflix’s Lightning-Fast Counters
How distributed systems, batching, and eventual consistency make millions of increments possible every second.
Oct 26 • 
Rahul Dhar
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 • 
Rahul Dhar
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 • 
Rahul Dhar
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 • 
Rahul Dhar
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 • 
Rahul Dhar
Idempotent Keys Explained: How Stripe's Approach Prevents Duplicate Requests and Builds Trust
A developer's guide to understanding idempotent keys, why they matter beyond payments, and how to implement them in Spring Boot for safer, more reliable…
Aug 27 • 
Rahul Dhar
My Journey Understanding an Inherited PostgreSQL System
Why Your Database Ignores Indexes: A Journey Through Planner Mysteries and Design Choices
Aug 19 • 
Rahul Dhar
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