System Design By First Principles What is System Design? Netflix: Millions of streams. Zero downtime. Uber: Peak demand. Smooth rides. Zomato: Dinner rush. No breakdowns. That reliability isn’t luck. And it isn’t just “good code”. That’s system design. When your app is small: - Few users - One server - One database Everything feels easy. But as users grow: - Traffic spikes - Data explodes - Failures happen Costs increase That’s when systems break unless they’re designed to grow. At its core: System design is deciding how your system should behave before you start writing code. It answers questions like: - Where does the data live? - What happens during traffic spikes? - What breaks first—and how do we recover? - How do system components talk to each other? There’s an important difference most of us miss: Coding asks: “Does it work?” System design asks: “Will it still work at scale?” Every real system is built from the same basic pieces: - Clients (apps, browsers) - Servers (business logic) - Data stores (databases, caches) - Network (communication) - Constraints (cost, latency, scale) System design is about connecting these pieces so growth doesn’t break everything. There is no perfect system. Every decision is a trade-off: - Speed vs consistency - Cost vs performance - Simplicity vs scalability Netflix’s design isn’t “best”. It’s best for Netflix’s problems. That’s the mindset system design builds. What I’m doing next: I’m starting to learn system design properly from first principles. I’m not an expert. I’m learning this as a beginner. I’ll share all I learn. Let’s learn this together and see where it goes.

My portfolio finally escaped localhost. 🚀 moinn.dev

I was laid off so I rebuilt their product but better (in 2 weeks from scratch) Open Canvas - a multiplayer site builder with an agent at the cursor. Most website builders ask you to fill in a template.I built one that lets you design - on a free-form canvas, with an AI agent at your cursor, where your whole team co-edits live and visitors see your publish update without refreshing. What makes it different: • Drag 14 design primitives anywhere — not into fixed slots • AI agent edits in plain English, you preview before it lands • Real-time co-editing (Yjs CRDT, Figma-style cursors) • Publish → every open visitor tab updates in <100ms Under the hood: one Cloudflare Worker, serverless Postgres, a first-class CMS, version history, a blocking accessibility audit, AI image gen, custom domains — all shipping as pure HTML, zero client-framework weight. It's MIT-licensed and built in the open

The Zeno waitlist is now live <3 A lot of developers learn how to write code but very few get the chance to practice working in code they didn't write. Zeno is being built for that exact gap. A place to work through realistic codebases, solve issues, and get feedback in an environment that feels closer to real software engineering. LINK IN REPLIES. would love to have you along for the journey :)

Oversharing vlogs 7/n - Today was AI exam - Woke up late around 6:30am, I was supposed to wake up at 5 - Exam me paper chut Gaya 😞 - Dsa solved 2 medium question - No gym today - Pullups : 10 - Steps : 10k - Protein intake: 90g - Skincare - Duolingo - Watched Anime : Rezero - Watched Sapne vs Everyone 1ep Okayish day Btw today's AI paper

in a world where AI can create anything, curiosity, taste, and imagination become the real advantage. do give it a read :D

Oversharing vlogs 6/n - Woke up around 8 am - Not very productive morning - Worked on old project - No gym today so ghar pe hi - Did 20 pullups - 40 pushups - Steps 15k - Skin care done - Watched Anime : Rezero - Kal se exam hai uski thodi padhai karni hai 😭 - Duolingo 20 mins - Protein 100g - Dsa 1 medium question - Also watched sapne vs everyone loved it loved it .... Same dialogue form the movie i absolutely loved

Just shipped GitMaxxing , a GitHub stats tracker I built from scratch over the past 2 weeks. What's under the hood: - GitHub App webhooks with HMAC signature verification - Event log pattern : raw events stored first, cron aggregates later - GraphQL backfill for full contribution history - Streak calculation from daily stats - Public shareable profile cards with export - Sync Now button to manually run the api endpoint for cron jobs, as vercel only allows one cron jobs per day on their free plan The most interesting part was the webhook and cron separation. Webhooks just log raw events. A cron job aggregates them into daily stats. If aggregation logic has a bug, raw data is intact and you can re-run. Built with: Next.js, Better Auth, Prisma, PostgreSQL, GitHub GraphQL API Try it: github-stats-tracker.vercel.… #buildinpublic #nextjs #webdev

wrote a detailed 20 min read on ren0va. go checkout :) tried to cover cloudfare workers, astrojs and islands, wrangler cli, fuzzy search and lazy loads on the go [link in comments]

wrote a detailed guide on Amazon's S3 HLD, erasure coding, checksums, building a multipart chunking engine, and writing prod styled codebases w cloudinary 20 min read. go checkout [link in comments]

5/n - Studied for WTL exam whole day - Steps : 10k - Gym : Shoulder Abs - Protein: 90g - Watched Anime : Rezero, COTE

4/n - Studied for endsem paper 1 - Dsa 1 medium question - Steps : 14k - Gym : Biceps - Protein intake: 100g almost - Visited Hanuman mandir - Watched Anime shamelessly 🤧

3/n - Practiced 1 Dsa problem - Studied for endsem little bit - Read a article on Redis - Gym : Triceps - Steps : 12k - Skin Care done - Watched Anime a bit more Overall decent day.

2/n - Revised Decision Trees - Practiced lot of DSA today - Worked on Project could have worked more - Steps 8k - Gym legs - Read : Forge you future

1/n - Studied Random Forest from Campus X - Practiced Dsa - Working on a project - Steps : 15k - Gym : Arms done - Skin Care routine done - Watched Anime