#486 System Design Course

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System Design Course

System design is the process of defining the architecture, interfaces, and data for a system that satisfies specific requirements. System design meets the needs of your business or organization through coherent and efficient systems. It requires a systematic approach to building and engineering systems. A good system design requires us to think about everything, from infrastructure all the way down to the data and how it's stored.

A brief history of the numeric keypad

Picture the keypad of a telephone and calculator side by side. Can you see the subtle difference between the two without resorting to your smartphone? Don’t worry if you can’t recall the design. Most of us are so used to accepting the common interfaces that we tend to overlook the calculator’s inverted key sequence. A calculator has the 7–8–9 buttons at the top whereas a phone uses the 1–2–3 format.

Basic Debugging And Problem Solving Questions

While a short post, I hope this will help others as it did me. These questions came out of an experience trying to troubleshoot a deployment issue I was called into some time ago. The problem got solved, but the approach to identifying the problem wasn't . . . ideal.

Programming breakthroughs we need

I feel like we need a few breakthroughs to drastically change how we develop software. And when I say breakthrough, I mean huge breakthrough. Something like a "structured programming" breakthrough, which completely changed how we think about programming. Here are some observations and ideas about that.

Use One Big Server

A lot of ink is spent on the “monoliths vs. microservices” debate, but the real issue behind this debate is about whether distributed system architecture is worth the developer time and cost overheads. By thinking about the real operational considerations of our systems, we can get some insight into whether we actually need distributed systems for most things.

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