GuideTechnology
16 min read
The security decisions that shape an architecture: trust boundaries and least privilege, authentication with passwords, MFA and identity providers, sessions versus tokens and JWTs, object-level authorisation, service-to-service identity, encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, input validation and abuse prevention, SSRF, data privacy, audit logs and payment data.
GuideTechnology
14 min read
An honest comparison of monoliths, modular monoliths and microservices: what each gives and costs, why a modular monolith is often the best start, how to draw service boundaries and own data, synchronous versus asynchronous communication, API gateways, service discovery, service meshes, the distributed-monolith trap, and migrating with the strangler fig pattern.
GuideTechnology
17 min read
How to model data for a system design: tables, primary and foreign keys, constraints, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, normalisation and deliberate denormalisation, ACID transactions, choosing id formats, and designing the model around access patterns. Also covers connection pooling, the N+1 problem and safe schema changes.
GuideTechnology
18 min read
Why queues exist and how they work: producers, consumers and brokers, acknowledgements and redelivery, visibility timeouts, retries, dead-letter queues, ordering, and delivery guarantees. Compares work queues, pub/sub and event streams such as Kafka, and shows how to design background workers that are safe to run twice.
GuideTechnology
18 min read
Why load balancers exist, how they spread traffic across servers, and what makes that possible: stateless services. Covers Layer 4 versus Layer 7, reverse proxies, round robin, weighted, least connections and hashing, health checks, draining, sticky sessions, redundancy of the load balancer itself, and autoscaling.
GuideTechnology
19 min read
Design APIs that clients can rely on: resources and URLs, HTTP methods and which are safe to retry, status codes, validation, error formats, cursor pagination, filtering, idempotency keys, rate-limit responses, versioning, and when gRPC or GraphQL fit better than REST.
GuideTechnology
5 min read
Frontend, backend, full-stack: the options are confusing. This roadmap sorts the roles, shows what to learn and in what order, and ends with projects and a job-hunt plan.
GuideTechnology
5 min read
What really happens in the second between pressing Enter and seeing a page? A plain walk through DNS, servers, HTTP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no jargon left unexplained.
