Blog
- 277Oct 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 → - 278Oct 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 → - 279Oct 2, 20193 minmarketingarchitecture
Lyft's Marketing Automation Platform Symphony
How can advertising campaigns achieve higher returns with less money and fewer people? Lyft's answer is automation, which includes an LTV prediction module, a budget allocation module, and a delivery module. When people are freed from tedious delivery tasks and can focus on understanding users, channels, and the messages they need to convey to their audience, they can achieve better campaign results.
Read more → - 280Oct 2, 20191 minentrepreneurshipproduct
Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid
The design lead at Spotify, with decades of experience in side projects, believes that successful side projects must be "stupid" to explore boldly and interestingly. Don't let complex issues like scaling, funding, and competitive analysis slow you down. Doing things is more important than learning.
Read more → - 281Sep 24, 20191 minsystem design
How to write solid code?
Empathy plays the most important role in writing solid code. Besides, you need to choose a sustainable architecture to decrease human resource costs in total as the project scales. Then, adopt patterns and best practices; avoid anti-patterns. Finally, refactor if necessary.
Read more → - 282Sep 17, 20192 minstartup
Metrics for Measuring a Product
There are many metrics to measure the quality of a product: the number of active users, profit, transaction volume, retention rate, and more. To ensure better product development, it is essential to focus on the following metrics: improve retention rate, as high retention means high valuation; assess weekly growth rate, maintaining its level will lead to exponential growth; prioritize iteration speed. When it comes to metrics, we must approach them correctly.
Read more → - 283Sep 17, 20193 minstartup
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Four main reasons why smart people have bad ideas: bad ideas are products of intuition; bad ideas prioritize being impressive over making money; bad ideas yield to fear of competition; bad ideas are too superficial. Therefore, smart people must clearly understand user needs and conduct user research to unleash endless potential and truly do smart things.
Read more → - 284Sep 9, 20197 minstartup
Introduction to Beancount.io
If you want to manage money in a better way, what you need is more understanding of your financial status. Beancount.io is such a tool that assists you by recording your financial transactions in text files and visualizing them into financial statements.
Read more → - 285Sep 1, 20195 minstrategy
The Company's Technology and Market Quadrant Diagram and Gravitational Directions
The quadrant diagram of market and technology determines the company's market position. With the inflation of technology, excellent technologies tend to become mediocre, and mediocre companies adopt excellent technologies; companies with a market will have a larger market, while those without a market will have a smaller one.
Read more → - 286Aug 13, 20193 minstrategy
Stratechery: Why Did Amazon Acquire Whole Foods?
Amazon's ambition to gain a share of all economic activities led it to enter the grocery service market. However, based on an analysis of Amazon's existing strategy and the cost disadvantages in fresh produce, it does not currently have a first and best supplier in grocery. Acquiring Whole Foods allowed Amazon to not only buy a retailer but also gain a customer for its existing business.
Read more → - 287Jul 25, 201919 minblockchain
Understanding decentralized identity (DID and DIF)
An introduction to decentralized identity (DID) and the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF): what they solve, how they work, and why they matter.
Read more → - 288Jul 16, 20193 minpsychology
Representative Heuristics — Making Judgments Under Uncertainty
Representative heuristics are one of the methods people use to judge probabilities and valuations. During this process, people often mistakenly equate representativeness with probability. To better assist in probability judgments, the following factors should be considered: base rates, sample size, correct understanding of odds, predictability, caution against overconfidence leading to an illusion of validity in predictions, and regression to the mean.
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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.
