#design-systems

The Outbox Pattern: Reliable Microservices Messaging

In distributed systems, one of the most common problems is ensuring that a business transaction and a message/event are both processed…

Reliable Side Effects with the Outbox Pattern

A business operation rarely ends with a single database update. After committing data, an application may need to:

Your API Is Fast. So Why Is Your System Slow?

Your API responds in 20 ms.

Design It the Way It Actually Runs

If you split building an app into its two essential processes, you get design and development.

Architecting for 25M Users: Holafly's Flutter Engine

A systems engineer's breakdown of Holafly’s transition to a Flutter monorepo, type-safe native bindings, and AI-driven localization.

14 D — Master the Mic: Top 10 UI/UX Design Interview Questions (Part 4 of 5)

Navigating AI in design, ethical frameworks, dark patterns, complex SaaS workflows, and strategic product vision.

The Weight of Legacy: 3 Ways Your Brand Architecture is Crushing Its Own Momentum

Most brands don’t fail because of bad ideas. They fail because they are crushed by their own gravity.

50 Threads Missed the Same Cache Key. I Expected 1 Database Query. I Got 50.

A small, measured experiment in why “add TTL jitter” and “add single-flight” are not the same fix.

When Live Location Tracking Starts Crushing Your Database

WebSockets for live delivery. Kafka for decoupling. Same event, two responsibilities.

AI Coding Agents Can Build the Interface. Now They Can Use a Real Icon System.

Introducing IconSearch for AI agents: intent-based icon search, project memory, exact SVG retrieval, and visual consistency audits across…

One Course, Many Cohorts: Designing Batch-Scoped Content for an LMS

How I decided what should stay shared, what each live batch should own, and how those boundaries shaped the data model.

Why Kafka Outages Always Recur Twice: Lessons from PagerDuty 2025 and Parse.ly 2015

Ten years and two completely different root causes apart, both companies fixed the symptom, declared victory, and watched the exact same…

From Design Governance to Human–AI Governance

AI is changing how we design. The bigger change may be how we decide.

System Design from Scratch #2: Why Simple Load Balancing Breaks When You Add More Servers

In the previous article, we learned how adding more servers helps us scale. But adding servers creates a surprisingly difficult problem.

Agentic Design System

Your Design System’s Biggest User Isn’t Human Anymore

I Added AI to My Design-System Workflow — Here’s What Actually Improved

From improving color foundations in Figma to creating Angular components, this is how I’ve been using AI as part of my real design-system…

Beyond REST: Building Real-Time Applications with Polling, Long Polling & WebSockets

Introduction

Una Librería de Componentes NO Es Un Design System

En una agencia, trabajando en el proyecto de una cuenta de biotecnología, heredamos una librería de componentes generosa: docenas de…

Atomic Design: The blog discussed in an interview that rewired How I Build Things.

A design methodology from 2016 that turned out not to be just about design.

The Invisible Architecture: Understanding How Boundaries Shape What Becomes Possible

Challenges of Regenerative Systems Design (Part 2 of 4)

Designing an Omnichannel Collaborative Ecosystem: IoT, AR, and Spatial Computing.

Detecting Conflicts in Database writes with Vector Clocks

Building a Key-Value Store Part 6 Commit covered in this milestone: 56af379

Oh, oh… Atomic!

Shared model for a Composable Content & Design Ecosystem

Taming the 9 AM Thundering Herd: A Layered Defense for Distributed Load Shaping

How client jitter, edge caching, rate limiting, and single-flight coalescing tame a 12,500 req/s spike

Amazon’s system design interview is a leadership test with a whiteboard

Your diagram was perfect. Then you said “the ops team would handle it”, and the loop was over.

Personal Branding Design Project

Creating a visual identity that reflects my work as a journalist, designer, and developer.

Generative UI in 2026: The Biggest Shift in Interface Design

In 2026, the core assumption of UI design is breaking. Interfaces no longer have to be fully designed in advance — they can be generated in…

Access Control Systems: Controlling Who Enters Your Facility

In today’s security-conscious business environment, knowing who enters your facility is just as important as knowing what happens inside…

The Best Designers in 2026 Are Not Pushing Pixels

The highest-value design skill in 2026 is not craft — it is judgment. The designers commanding senior roles and strategic influence are not…

Make it Real: Designing a Scalable Brand Ecosystem

About

UI trends for 2026: what’s working (and what’s already starting to show its limitations)

We are now halfway through 2026, and the landscape of digital design looks very different from what many observers imagined just a year…

The best shadcn/ui libraries in 2026

Last updated July 31, 2026.

Idempotency Keys in Payment APIs: The Small Header That Prevents Double Charges

Introduction: Why retries are dangerous in payment systems

Why systems beat goals every time

Last week I had my first conversation with a new client. I asked him a simple question.

Engineering Concepts You Keep Mixing Up (Explained Simply)

If you’ve spent time learning backend engineering, system design, or LLMs, you’ve probably come across terms that sound similar but mean…

Designing a Bank HR Management System: Lessons from a Real-World Enterprise Architecture

How layered architecture, microservices, and security-first design come together to support 16,000+ employees across 2,400 branches.

Most Design Systems Are Built Backwards. Here’s Why They Turn Into Nightmares.

I’ve watched at least a dozen founders build a design system like they were assembling IKEA furniture at 2 a.m. Missing three screws…

What the Toyota Production System Can Teach Us About Building Design Systems.

The factory floor and the Figma file aren't as far apart as they look.

The Complete Guide to CDN (Part 1): Why Every Software Engineer Should Understand CDNs

Learn why CDNs exist, the problems they solve, and how modern Internet companies like Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, and Akamai deliver…

My Microsoft MVP Desk Ring Accidentally Became a Lesson in Distributed Systems

A few days ago, Microsoft renewed my MVP award for another year.

Designing a Production-Style Media Processing Pipeline.

Users upload videos to streaming platforms every day. Whether it’s YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, or any other media platform, the experience…

19th July: The Day a Single Parameter Mismatch Paralyzed 8.5 Million Windows Machines

Two years ago today, on July 19, 2024, the modern world ground to a sudden, terrifying halt. Over 8.5 million Windows machines froze…

Our Rate Limit Said 100 a Minute. Behind 50 Gateways, It Was 5,000.

The token bucket took an afternoon. Getting fifty machines to agree on one count took three rebuilds.

Stop Drawing Boxes. Start Defending Designs.

Most system design practice looks the same: open a blank doc, draw a few rectangles, name them “API,” “Cache,” and “DB,” then hope the…

Botones: Preguntas Clave Más Allá Del Contraste

Decisiones que vale la pena revisar al implementar o auditar un botón

Por que tantos Design Systems perdem valor com o tempo?

Por que governança, manutenção contínua e adoção pelos times são os verdadeiros fatores que determinam o sucesso de um Design System.

Apa itu Design System?

By. Khansa Humairo

I Rebuilt Every Button In Our Design System. No One Noticed.

What silence taught me about invisible work, review culture, and the real job of a design system.

I Audited 40 Enterprise Dashboards. They All Failed the Same Way

The problem was never the data. It was who the dashboard was actually built for.

Your Login Method Is One if-Block Away From Disaster

There’s a pattern that fixes it — and one of the most-used auth libraries on the planet named itself after it.