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12 articlesDongxu Huang: Building a Database Startup in China
Notes from Dongxu Huang on building TiDB, a distributed database startup in China: the open-source strategy, community building, and key database principles.
Stream and Batch Processing Frameworks
An overview of stream and batch processing frameworks and why they matter for handling large-scale data with fault tolerance and unified task abstractions.
Toutiao Recommendation System: P1 Overview
An overview of Toutiao's recommendation system: how it maximizes user satisfaction by modeling content features, user profiles, and contextual signals.
Designing Uber Ride-Hailing Service
Requirements for designing Uber ride-hailing: providing services for the global transportation market; large-scale real-time scheduling; backend design; Uber ride-hailing design process: architecture; microservices; scheduling services; payment services; user profile services and trip record services, notification push services.
Task-Related Maturity
There is no good or bad management style; there is only effective and ineffective. The most important responsibility of a manager is to inspire subordinates to perform at their best. A person's task-related maturity depends on the specific work project, and its improvement takes time. When the maturity of the task and the individual's knowledge level and motivation reach a certain height, the manager can successfully delegate work to them.
Aaron Siedler: 'Change Aversion': Why Users Dislike Your New Products and Features (and How to Address It)
Whenever you change something that users frequently interact with in your product, there will be unrest and opposition among users; this is known as
Ads Ecosystem
Advertisers express their needs for ads to data-management platform and agencies. Then ads are delivered to ad networks and ad exchanges. Eventually, ads are presented to customers by publishers. The whole cycle is the so-called ads ecosystem.
Canadians Complain About Online Payment Systems
Thirty years have passed, and online payments still lack a seamless experience. People believe payments should be as convenient as browsing, without the need to create accounts, passwords, or fill in credit card numbers, all while being bombarded with endless spam. Content creators are forced to rely on ads, benefiting only large companies. The internet urgently needs a foundational framework that incentivizes creativity and protects privacy.
Differences and Similarities in Eastern and Western Workplace Cultures
Comparing Eastern and Western workplace cultures across dimensions like communication style, meeting norms, relationship-building, and professional values.
A Closer Look at iOS Architecture Patterns
A closer look at iOS architecture patterns — MVC, MVP, MVVM, and VIPER — evaluating each for responsibility distribution, testability, and maintainability.
How to Stream Video to Mobile Devices Using HTTP? HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)
Mobile video playback services using HTTP Live Streaming face two main challenges: limited memory and storage on mobile devices; and the need to dynamically adjust video quality during transmission due to unstable network connections and varying bandwidth. We can address these issues at both the server and client levels.
Designing Facebook's Photo Storage System
There are two reasons why Facebook handles photo storage: the petabyte-scale volume of blob data; traditional NFS-based designs face metadata bottlenecks, where massive metadata severely limits hit rates. The solution is to aggregate hundreds of thousands of images into a single Haystack storage file, thereby eliminating the metadata burden.
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.
