System design Memes

Endian Justifies The Means

16 days ago 105.6K views 0 shares

Nobody in the history of programming has ever chosen an endianness based on performance. But choosing big endian because it "looks pretty" in a hex editor? That's the kind of arbitrary decision that haunts codebases for decades. Some dev probably made this call back in 2003 and now there's an entire team maintaining compatibility layers for it. For the uninitiated: endianness determines how bytes are ordered in memory. Little endian (0x01 0x02 0x03 0x04) reads as 0x04030201, while big endian reads naturally as 0x01020304. Absolutely nobody cares until you need to transfer data between systems, then suddenly everyone cares very much .

The Perfect Architectural Diagram

Backend Webdev Javascript Programming Frontend

28 days ago 200.8K views 0 shares

The perfect architectural diagram doesn't exi— Backend: chaotic outdoor cooking with multiple fires, pots bubbling over, smoke everywhere. Just raw functionality with zero aesthetics. The digital equivalent of "it ain't pretty but it works." Frontend: pristine white wedding reception setup. Everything perfectly aligned, clean, and ready to impress the users who'll never know about the kitchen chaos that makes it all possible. APIs: The stoic waiters standing between these two worlds, silently transferring data back and forth with emotionless efficiency. They don't care about the mess they're carrying or how pretty the destination is - they just pass the payload and move on. And we call this masterpiece "modern architecture." Chef's kiss.

Back In My Day We Actually Engineered

Programming Javascript Debugging Frontend Backend

28 days ago 164.6K views 0 shares

Grandma dev isn't wrong. Modern "software engineering" is often just gluing together 47 npm packages and hoping nothing breaks after the next update. Remember when we actually designed systems instead of just importing half of GitHub? Those were the days when UML diagrams weren't just decorations for PowerPoint presentations and "technical debt" meant more than "I'll fix it later" (narrator: they never did). The old guard remembers when optimization meant squeezing performance out of every byte, not just throwing more AWS instances at the problem.

I Honestly Don't Know What I Was Thinking

Databases Algorithms Programming Debugging Backend

1 month ago 216.1K views 0 shares

I Honestly Don't Know What I Was Thinking

Oh. My. GOD. The AUDACITY of our past selves! 💀 What seemed like a BRILLIANT idea at 2 AM ("Let's just add a simple history feature so users can undo operations!") turns into an existential crisis when you realize you've opened a Pandora's box of race conditions and theoretical nightmares. Your brain literally SPLITS IN TWO - part of you is like "this is fine, just a quick feature" while the other part is DROWNING in the horrifying reality that you've just volunteered to rewrite half your database architecture for what was supposed to be a "20 minute adventure." And the worst part? Future you will look back at this code and wonder what kind of DERANGED LUNATIC wrote it. Spoiler alert: it was you. It was ALWAYS you.

The Holy Trinity Of Confusion

Programming Java Debugging Backend

1 month ago 217.0K views 2 shares

Ah, the diagram that makes even senior devs question their understanding of parallel computing. It's like trying to explain the difference between "your" and "you're" to someone who insists they're identical. This confusing web of "is" and "is not" relationships perfectly captures why technical interviews about concurrency make everyone sweat. You think you understand it until someone asks you to explain the difference, then suddenly you're drawing circles on a whiteboard while questioning your career choices. The best part? No matter how confidently you explain this to junior devs, they'll give you that blank stare that says "I'll just Google this again next week when I forget."

The Architectural Fiction Award Goes To...

Devops Agile Programming Backend Cloud

2 months ago 281.3K views 0 shares

The Architectural Fiction Award Goes To...

That face when your company's architectural diagrams belong in a museum of fiction, not a client presentation. Nothing quite like watching management proudly display those beautiful, pristine diagrams with perfectly aligned microservices while you're sitting there knowing the actual system is held together by duct tape, prayers, and that one hack from 2018 that nobody understands but everyone's afraid to remove. The diagram says "elegant distributed system" but reality says "monolithic spaghetti with extra meatballs of technical debt."

Is Winning Binary Or Continuous

Programming Algorithms Math Debugging Testing

3 months ago 223.9K views 0 shares

Classic edge case thinking that would make any programmer proud. While the rest of humanity is stuck in the swim-run dichotomy, this genius is exploiting the system's unhandled exception: sharks with bicycles. This is precisely how developers approach problems—finding the absurd logical loophole that technically satisfies requirements while completely missing the point. It's the same energy as responding to "make this function more efficient" by deleting all the error handling.

We've Refactored To Microservices

Devops Programming Backend Cloud

3 months ago 237.3K views 1 shares

OH MY GOD, look at what they've done to my beautiful monolithic dinner! 😱 They've taken what was once a glorious heap of mixed vegetables and LITERALLY DISMEMBERED IT into hundreds of tiny, isolated cubes! Sure, each little vegetable piece is now "independently scalable" and can "fail without bringing down the entire meal," but at what cost?! Now I need seventeen different microservices just to assemble one bite of what used to be a simple spoonful! The deployment complexity has increased by 800%, and the fork latency is THROUGH THE ROOF! This is what happens when the architecture team reads one Medium article and decides to revolutionize everything!

The TCP/IP Handshake: A Live Demonstration

Networking Webdev Programming Backend

3 months ago 203.9K views 0 shares

The TCP/IP Handshake: A Live Demonstration

The perfect visual representation of the client-server handshake! The stoic, unassuming server in gray just standing there waiting to be connected to, while the flashy client in bright yellow actively initiates the connection. And there they are, literally shaking hands labeled as "TCP/IP" - the protocol suite that makes their relationship possible. Just like in real networking, the server looks slightly uncomfortable being approached, but is professionally obligated to accept the connection request. The client, meanwhile, has those glasses because it obviously needs to see where it's connecting to. Networking protocols have never been so awkwardly teenage.

Interview Preparation Vs Actual Work

Programming Algorithms Debugging Databases Backend

4 months ago 257.5K views 0 shares

Left side: A pristine O'Reilly book with an elegant wild boar illustration, promising the secrets to "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" with "reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems." Right side: The same boar, but now sleeping on a dirty mattress next to garbage bins. The elegant theory meets the trashy reality. Spent three months mastering B-trees and distributed consensus algorithms just to end up writing SQL queries that could've been figured out with a 5-minute Stack Overflow search. The duality of software engineering: expectation vs. the glorious dumpster fire we call production.

The Chad Monolith vs The Virgin Microservices

Backend Devops Kubernetes Docker Programming

4 months ago 344.9K views 0 shares

The Chad Monolith vs The Virgin Microservices

Oh. My. GOD. The eternal architecture war rages on! 💅 On the left, we have the frazzled microservices fanatic, probably juggling 47 different repos while frantically debugging why Service A can't talk to Service B even though they were LITERALLY BESTIES yesterday! Meanwhile, the monolith enjoyer on the right is just *radiating* Chad energy with that smile that screams "My entire application is ONE codebase and I sleep like a BABY at night!" The absolute AUDACITY of this meme to capture the existential crisis of modern architecture choices so perfectly! No wonder deployment day for microservices fans requires therapy afterward!

One DB For All Services Is Great Design

Devops Kubernetes Docker Programming Backend

4 months ago 229.6K views 0 shares

Ah, the classic "Scooby-Doo villain reveal" but with a software architecture twist. The company proudly announces their fancy microservice architecture, but when the developer pulls off the mask, surprise! It's just a distributed monolith underneath. For the uninitiated: a distributed monolith is when you split your application into separate services that look like microservices, but they're so tightly coupled they can't be deployed independently. So you get all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits. It's like buying a sports car but filling the trunk with concrete.

Browse