Systems · Design Notes
Notes on How I Design Systems
Working notes on distributed systems — the patterns I actually reach for, and the failure modes that show up after the launch post is forgotten.
§ 1
Event-Driven Backbones with KafkaWhen to reach for Kafka, what the outbox pattern really buys you, partitioning for ordering, and the things that break in year two.
11 min · read§ 2Designing a RAG Pipeline for ProductionChunking, hybrid retrieval, reranking, grounding with citations, and the evals that separate demo-ware from production.
13 min · read§ 3Multi-Tenant Isolation PatternsPooled vs siloed vs cells: picking an isolation model that matches your blast-radius budget, not the hype cycle.
9 min · read§ 4Observability That People Actually UseSLOs, burn-rate alerts, and why your dashboard graveyard is a product problem, not a tooling one.
8 min · readPLATES
PLATE IINFRASTRUCTURE
The Cloud Topology
A labeled blueprint of the production topology — devices to dashboards. Click any node to inspect its role and trade-offs.
inspect the plate →PLATES II–VIIAPPLIED AIAnatomy of an LLM Pipeline
Input to streamed answer, drawn as a numbered sequence of plates: tokenize, retrieve, generate, stream.
follow the sequence →