Byte-Sized Design

MongoDB Taught Its Database to See the Future

How Atlas built a predictive auto-scaler that scales before your servers break a sweat

Jun 1 • Byte-Sized Design

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May 2026

When "Distributed Backup" Isn't Actually Distributed: Lessons From the Coinbase Outage

The May 2026 AWS thermal event, the latency-versus-resilience tradeoff that broke coinbase, and what happens when “distributed backup” isn’t actually…

May 16 • Byte-Sized Design

8

How Slack Keeps a Team of AI Agents from Losing the Plot

Inside the three-channel context system behind slack's security investigations

May 8 • Byte-Sized Design

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April 2026

March 2026

Slack Rebuilt Notifications for Millions of Users

Slack rebuilt its notification system from scratch, here's the architecture decision that made it possible without breaking millions of users.

Mar 30 • Byte-Sized Design

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How Uber Killed Hours-Old Data (And Why Your Batch Jobs Are a Liability)

What they found when they finally did the math on stale data.

Mar 24 • Byte-Sized Design

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3

GitHub’s Elasticsearch Problem Was Seven Years in the Making. Here’s How They Finally Fixed It

Why the right fix wasn't available until now, and what they did in the meantime.

Mar 16 • Byte-Sized Design

11

How a 12-Word Issue Title Owned 4,000 Developer Machines

TLDR One GitHub issue title.

Mar 7 • Byte-Sized Design

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February 2026

Meta Used LLMs to Build Tests That Are Supposed to Fail

The tests that were built to fail

Feb 24 • Byte-Sized Design

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The Architect Is Not Being Replaced. The Architect Is Being Redefined.

And if you don't notice the difference, you'll end up on the wrong side of it.

Feb 17 • Byte-Sized Design

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Inside Uber’s 350PB Data Lake: The Distcp Rewrite That 5x’d Performance

How Uber scaled data replication from 250TB to 1PB per day by optimizing Apache Distcp, cutting latency 90%, 5x’ing capacity, and migrating 306PB to…

Feb 11 • Byte-Sized Design

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Knowing When to Stop Engineering: Airbnb’s Hardest Lesson

Tens of millions of lines of code. 700 services. 450 data pipelines. 4.5 years of migration. And the thing that could have cut the timeline in half was…

Feb 1 • Byte-Sized Design

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