Not tutorials. Long-form breakdowns of the outages, architectures and engineering decisions behind the systems billions of people depend on — written and filmed by Odhiambo Atieno.
Latest episodeA handful of companies, a few thousand BGP routes and one expired certificate stand between you and a working internet. Here is how thin the margin really is.
43 seconds of network partition, 24 hours of degraded service, and one of the clearest postmortems ever published. A walkthrough of how a database split-brain unfolds.
The classic interview question, taken seriously: every hop from keystroke to painted pixel, including the parts most answers skip.
Transcoding ladders, chunked delivery, adaptive bitrate and a cache sitting inside your ISP. The pipeline behind the play button.
A deploy to seven servers. One server missed. Dead code reactivated by a reused feature flag. The fastest bankruptcy in software history.
One region, one control-plane dependency, and a long tail of services that were 'multi-region' only on the architecture diagram.
Pages, tuples, the write-ahead log and MVCC. What actually lands on disk when you run an INSERT — and why your table keeps growing after DELETE.
A reverse proxy in front of a fifth of the web, a DDoS absorber, a DNS resolver and an edge runtime. Enormous leverage, and an enormous blast radius.
Millions of Windows machines into a boot loop from a content update — not a code update. A study in what counts as a deploy.
Identity, addressing, transport and trust — what I would keep from the original design, and what fifty years of hindsight says I should throw out.
The full arc of the show. Episodes ship weekly, with the video and the written investigation released together.
Twenty episodes on the failures that took down the internet — what broke, why it broke, and what the postmortem actually said.
Twenty episodes tracing a single request through Google, Netflix, Uber, Stripe, Postgres, Docker and the CDN layer in between.
Twenty episodes on architecture arguments that never end: monoliths, microservices, CAP, caching, auth, and the future of the craft.
One short email a week: what I shipped, what I learned, and one idea worth your time. Covers software engineering, AI, and infrastructure. No filler, unsubscribe whenever.
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