2 posts tagged with "backend"

There's a moment in every system design discussion where someone has to answer "okay, but will it actually handle that?" — and the people who freeze are the ones who never learned to estimate. Back-of-the-envelope math has a reputation for being scary, but it's genuinely just multiplication with round numbers. This post covers how I do quick capacity estimates, plus the four-step framework I use to keep a design conversation from turning into a rambling mess.

This is part two of my system design fundamentals series. Part one covered scaling, latency, and availability, which you'll want in your head for the estimation part.

I've been meaning to write down how I actually think about system design for a while. Not the interview-flashcard version, but the mental models I reach for when someone asks "will this hold up when we have a million users?" So I'm turning it into a short series. This first post is about the foundations — scaling, latency, throughput, and availability — because almost every design decision downstream comes back to these four ideas.

If you've ever nodded along to "just add more servers" without being totally sure what that buys you, this one's for you.