system-design

Engineering Blogs

The best system design education after this repo is reading how real companies actually built and scaled their systems. Engineering blogs are where the industry writes down its hard-won lessons — the real trade-offs, the outages, the migrations. This chapter curates the ones worth following and how to read them for maximum learning.

Time to read: ~9 minutes; follow them for years

Why engineering blogs are gold

🚨 Case studies teach you the ideal; engineering blogs teach you the reality — with the messy trade-offs, the “we tried X and it failed,” the scale numbers, and the migrations that took two years. Reading them:

Grounds the theory — you see the patterns from Part 12 in the wild, with real numbers and constraints.
Gives you fresh, credible references for interviews (“Discord wrote about migrating to ScyllaDB because…”).
Keeps you current — the field moves; blogs are where new patterns first appear.
Builds intuition for what actually breaks at scale.

🚨 Read them actively: for each post, ask what problem, what options, what trade-off, what did they choose and why — the same lens you’d use in an interview.

The must-follow company blogs

The companies whose blogs consistently produce excellent, detailed system design content:

Netflix Tech Blog — resilience, chaos engineering, streaming, microservices at huge scale. A gold standard.
Uber Engineering — geospatial, real-time, data platforms, migrations — directly relevant to ride-hailing-style problems.
Meta / Facebook Engineering — social graph, feeds, storage (TAO, Haystack), scale.
Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Slack, Shopify, DoorDash, Grab, Lyft, Pinterest, LinkedIn — each rich with detailed design/scaling posts in their domains.
Cloudflare Blog — networking, CDN, DDoS, edge — superb deep technical writing.
AWS Architecture Blog / Builders’ Library — 🚨 Amazon’s Builders’ Library is exceptional on distributed-systems fundamentals (timeouts, retries, load shedding) straight from the people who run it.
Discord Engineering — famous posts on scaling messaging and their database migrations.
Canva, Figma, Notion, Datadog — modern product-scale engineering write-ups.

Regional / relevant to this guide’s audience: Careem, Grab, Gojek, Sea/Shopee engineering blogs — directly relevant if you target MENA/SEA scale-ups.

Aggregators & how to keep up

🚨 High Scalability (highscalability.com) — a long-running archive of “how X is built” architecture posts; a treasure trove.
InfoQ — architecture articles, conference talks, trend reports.
The Morning Paper (archive) — Adrian Colyer’s summaries of CS papers; makes papers approachable.
Newsletters: ByteByteGo, Pointer, Architecture Notes, The Pragmatic Engineer — curated engineering reading delivered to you.
Hacker News — where many of these posts surface and get discussed (read the comments for critique).
Company “eng blog” RSS / a reader — subscribe so good posts come to you.

Conference talks (video)

Sometimes better than blogs for architecture:

QCon, Strange Loop, AWS re:Invent, KubeCon, Velocity — recorded talks on real architectures.
**“ scaling " talks** on YouTube — engineers walking through their designs.
Search a system you’re studying + “at scale” / “architecture” for a talk.

How to turn blog reading into interview skill

🚨 Passive reading builds little. Do this instead:

Pick a post about a system you’ve studied (e.g. Discord on messaging → you did chat).
Predict first: before reading their solution, design it yourself. Then compare — where did reality differ from your design, and why?
Extract the trade-off: every good post has a central “we chose X over Y because Z.” Note it; it’s an interview soundbite.
Note the numbers: real scale figures make your interview estimates credible.
Keep a notes file of “cool things real systems do” — it compounds into deep intuition.

🛠️ Try it

1. Subscribe to five blogs today. Pick five from the list (weight toward your target companies/domain), add them to a reader or newsletter, so good content comes to you regularly.

2. Predict-then-read one post. Choose a post about a system you’ve studied, design it yourself first, then read theirs and write down the three biggest differences and why reality diverged.

3. Start a “real systems” notes file. Each week, jot one interesting technique or trade-off from a blog post. In a few months you’ll have a personal, credible reference that makes your interviews concrete.