engineering
Backend Concepts Worth Actually Understanding
My personal notes on 10 backend concepts I am working through — what they are, how I understand them, and the things that tripped me up.
Event-Driven Architecture
How event-driven systems actually work under the hood — brokers, consumers, delivery guarantees, and the tradeoffs you have to live with.
Saga Pattern
How distributed transactions work without 2-phase commit — choreography vs orchestration, compensating transactions, and where it breaks down.
Linearizability: What 'Correct' Actually Means When Operations Overlap
A careful look at why informal correctness arguments collapse under concurrency, and what it takes to replace them with something rigorous.
When One Core Wasn’t Enough: Why Systems Got More Complex
A short walkthrough of why hardware moved to multicore, why speedup is limited, and why that forced software to become more complex. This sets up the core problems behind concurrency and distributed systems.