Case Studies

Architecture teardowns of real systems - where theory meets reality. Every study follows the template and ends with a Steal / Avoid section; that footer is the line between a teardown and an architect's note.

• products/ - Uber (geospatial + dispatch), Slack (WebSocket fan-out), Telegram (multi-DC sync), Netflix, Discord, Stripe
• databases/ - Spanner, Cassandra, DynamoDB, CockroachDB
• streaming/ - Kafka, Flink, Pulsar
• chains/ - Bitcoin, Ethereum, a modern L2
• ai/ - Perplexity, Cursor, Harvey, Copilot

Each study links back into the primitives it uses (for example consistent hashing) so the notebook reads as one connected graph.