Blog
- 313Sep 14, 20183 minmarketing
What is the chasm in the technology adoption lifecycle?
Explaining the chasm between early adopters and the early majority in the technology adoption lifecycle.
Read more → - 314Sep 14, 20183 minmarketing
What is the Chasm in the Technology Adoption Lifecycle?
High-tech companies often introduce disruptive innovations. The user growth of these products follows an S-curve. Developing a high-tech market means smoothly transitioning this cycle from left to right, breaking through one user group at a time. Leveraging the momentum of the left-side user group makes it easier to market products to the right-side user group. Observing the technology adoption lifecycle reveals two chasms and one gap.
Read more → - 315Sep 13, 20182 minsystem design
How Netflix Serves Viewing Data?
How Netflix designed its viewing data service to handle billions of events per day at scale.
Read more → - 316Sep 12, 20182 minsystem design
How to design robust and predictable APIs with idempotency?
APIs can be un-robust and un-predictable. To solve the problem, three principles should be observed. The client retries to ensure consistency. Retry with idempotency, exponential backoff, and random jitter.
Read more → - 317Sep 12, 20182 minsystem design
How to Design Robust and Predictable APIs with Idempotency?
Why are APIs unreliable? Networks can fail, and servers can fail. Three principles to solve this problem: the client uses "retry" to ensure state consistency; the retry requests must include an idempotent unique ID; retries must be responsible, such as following an exponential backoff algorithm, because we do not want a large number of clients to retry simultaneously.
Read more → - 318Sep 11, 20181 minsystem design
How to scale a web service?
Using the AKF Scale Cube to scale web services through cloning, microservices, and data partitioning.
Read more → - 319Sep 11, 20181 minsystem design
How to Build a Scalable Web Service?
How to build a scalable web service? One word: Split. The AKF Scale Cube tells us the three dimensions of "splitting": horizontal scaling; business splitting; data partitioning.
Read more → - 320Sep 10, 20181 mincorporate ladder
Why mentors cannot help with your promotion?
Successful Caucasian men receive more career guidance than women and multicultural professionals even though more women have mentors than men. The reason is mentors can not help with promotions but sponsors can.
Read more → - 321Sep 10, 20181 mincorporate ladder
Why Career Mentors Cannot Help You Get Promoted?
Research shows that women have more career mentors than men, yet they get promoted less. Career mentors cannot help you get promoted, but career sponsors can. A sponsor should be your: career investor and beneficiary; direct influencer of promotions; resource sharer; amplifier.
Read more → - 322Sep 7, 20181 minsystem design
How to stream video over HTTP for mobile devices? HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)
Video service over Http for mobile devices has two problems: limited memory or storage and unstable network connection and variable bandwidth. HTTP live streaming solve this with separation of concerns, file segmentation, and indexing.
Read more → - 323Sep 6, 20183 minsystem design
What are the use cases for key-value caching?
The essence of Key Value Cache is to reduce data access latency. Common strategies for cache design include read-through/write-through and cache aside. The specific strategy should be chosen based on your business needs.
Read more → - 324Sep 5, 20181 minleadership
Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action? Golden Circle
People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Simon Sinek coined a phrase ‘Golden Circle’ which has three tiers, from core to exterior - why, how, and what. However, average leaders think from what, how, to why.
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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.
