Blog
- 181Nov 4, 20192 minmanagementstrategy
Charles Handy: The Second Curve
When you know where to go, it is often too late; if you always stick to the original path, you will miss the road to the future.
Read more → - 182Nov 2, 20193 mingrowth
Ten Reasons to Fail at Growth
Facebook's VP of Growth once discussed with Mark why they succeeded. The answer isn't that they are exceptionally smart or experienced, but rather that they work incredibly hard and execute effectively. Compared to execution, growth is optional. Everyone understands the reasoning; the difference lies in whether people can execute quickly. Execution is challenging, and there are ten reasons why growth execution fails.
Read more → - 183Oct 30, 20192 mingrowth
The Four Fits Model for a $100 Million Business
For Hubspot's freemium and fully automated (touchless) software business, how can one achieve the highest growth in the least amount of time while being VC-backed? Brian Balfour's answer is the Four Fits Model: the four factors of product, market, channel, and model are interlinked and must work together.
Read more → - 184Oct 27, 20199 minsystem design
Designing Human-Centric Internationalization (i18n) Engineering Solutions
Most products from Silicon Valley companies target the global market, and internationalization is a strategic key for multinational companies venturing into this market. The i18n engineering solution we designed primarily addresses three major issues in the development process of websites and mobile apps: 1. Language, 2. Time and Time Zones, 3. Numbers and Currency. Like all software system development, there is no silver bullet for internationalization; great works are crafted through diligent foundational work.
Read more → - 185Oct 19, 20194 minsystem design
Designing a Load Balancer or Dropbox Bandaid
Large-scale web services deal with high-volume traffic, but one host could only serve a limited amount of requests. There is usually a server farm to take the traffic altogether. How to route them so that each host could evenly receive the request?
Read more → - 186Oct 19, 20194 minsystem design
Designing a Load Balancer
Internet services often need to handle traffic from around the world, but a single server can only serve a limited number of requests at the same time. Therefore, we typically have a server cluster to collectively manage this traffic. The question arises: how can we evenly distribute this traffic across different servers?
Read more → - 187Oct 16, 20191 minsystem design
Concurrency Models
Five concurrency models you may want to know: Single-threaded; Multiprocessing and lock-based concurrency; Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP); Actor Model (AM); Software Transactional Memory (STM).
Read more → - 188Oct 13, 20195 miniot
The World Is Not Flat — The Economist Special Report: Global Supply Chains
Technology and politics are two forces that influence supply chains. In the context of global industrialization driven by technological change, developed countries provide technology while developing countries offer cheap labor. Companies consider two main points when transforming their supply chains: the risks associated with reducing supply chain costs and the increased availability of products and services due to global trade.
Read more → - 189Oct 10, 20192 minsystem design
Designing typeahead search or autocomplete
How to design a realtime typeahead autocomplete service? Linkedin's Cleo lib answers with a multi-layer architecture (browser cache / web tier / result aggregator / various typeahead backend) and 4 elements (inverted / forward index, bloom filter, scorer).
Read more → - 190Oct 9, 20193 minmarketingsystem design
Lyft's Marketing Automation Platform -- Symphony
To achieve a higher ROI in advertising, Lyft launched a marketing automation platform, which consists of three main components: lifetime value forecaster, budget allocator, and bidders.
Read more → - 191Oct 5, 20193 minsystem design
Designing Airbnb or a hotel booking system
For guests and hosts, we store data with a relational database and build indexes to search by location, metadata, and availability. We can use external vendors for payment and remind the reservations with a priority queue.
Read more → - 192Oct 3, 20192 minsystem design
Designing Memcached or an in-memory KV store
Memcached = rich client + distributed servers + hash table + LRU. It features a simple server and pushes complexity to the client) and hence reliable and easy to deploy.
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About Tian Pan
I'm Tian Pan, an engineer-founder focused on agentic engineering — building autonomous AI systems and scaling engineering teams. I write practical guides on system design, technical leadership, and shipping with AI agents. Previously an early engineer at Uber, Brex, and IoTeX.
