System Design Nuggets

Daily deep dives into system design & modern architecture covering distributed systems, databases, caching, sharding, message queues, and more. Clear. Practical. FAANG-level insights.

By Arslan Ahmad

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System Design Nuggets

LLM Inference at Scale: Batching, Caching, Routing, and Cost Control

How Production LLM Systems Achieve High Throughput and Low Cost Through Batching, Caching, Routing, and Careful Resource Control

9 hrs ago•Arslan Ahmad

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[50 System Design Concepts for Beginners in 90 Minutes

2026 Edition

Dec 6, 2025•Arslan Ahmad

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[50 System Design Patterns Every Engineer Should Know in 90 Minutes

2026 Edition

May 11•Arslan Ahmad

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System Design Interview Guide: Designing Scalable APIs (REST, Idempotency, & More)

Dec 22, 2025•Arslan Ahmad

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16 Must Know API Concepts for Software Engineers

Nov 26, 2025•Arslan Ahmad

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Don’t let System Design be the round that fails you.

The Resilience Patterns Every System Design Candidate Should Know

The Anatomy of a Cascading Failure, the Danger of Retry Storms, and How Circuit Breakers and Their Companion Patterns Prevent Both

Jun 23•Arslan Ahmad

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References for System Design

• The Distributed Systems Roadmap Every Software Engineer Should Follow
  Why systems fail, how they scale, and what holds them together. CAP theorem, sharding, message queues, circuit breakers, microservices, and 16 more…
  Jun 20•Arslan Ahmad

• Stop Defaulting to WebSockets: When to Use SSE or Long Polling Instead
  How Long Polling, Server-Sent Events, and WebSockets Actually Work, and When Each Is the Right Choice for Your System
  Jun 18•Arslan Ahmad

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