Tag
performance
Engineering Field Notes
The Trade-offs Behind Every System Design
How to reason about speed, freshness, durability, scale, and complexity by following where work and state move.
Engineering Field Notes
How Much Does Big-O Matter in System Design?
Use asymptotic complexity to spot growth problems, then budget the I/O, fan-out, queues, and failures it cannot describe.
Engineering Field Notes
What Scalability Really Means
How to reason about growth, bottlenecks, load distribution, partitioning, overload, and the cost of adding capacity.
Engineering Field Notes
The Five Constraints of System Design
A practical mental model for latency, throughput, availability, durability, and consistency—and why improving one can make another harder.