Bridging the gap between high-level system design theory and hands-on, runnable implementations.
Most system design articles, interview guides, and conference talks focus on conceptual diagrams: boxes for services, arrows for data flow, and bullet lists of trade-offs. While useful, they often stop short of showing how to build and reason about the real code, infrastructure definitions, failure modes, and operational concerns that emerge once you go beyond the whiteboard.
This repository exists to be a practical companion: a curated collection of small, focused, end-to-end examples that you can clone, run, dissect, extend, and production-hardening if you wish. Each pattern demonstrates:
- A realistic problem scenario (e.g. wallet balance contention, collaborative document editing, large object updates).
- Concrete code (functions, services, infra templates) — not pseudo-code.
- The operational angle: idempotency, retries, concurrency control, observability hooks.
- Common failure cases and mitigation strategies.
See LICENSE for details.
Open an issue for discussion, clarifications, or requests. Practical gaps you struggle with in design interviews or production incidents are prime candidates.
"Theory tells you what you might build. Practice tells you what actually breaks." This repo is about the latter.
