Good System Design: It's Not About Clever Tricks

This article critiques system designs focused on flashy techniques, arguing that good system design prioritizes simplicity and reliability over complex distributed consensus mechanisms or CQRS. The author emphasizes the importance of state management, advocating for minimizing stateful components. Key aspects like database design (schemas, indexes), caching, background jobs, event-driven architectures, and handling bottlenecks are discussed in detail. The article stresses leveraging the database's capabilities, avoiding unnecessary in-memory processing. It highlights the importance of hot paths, logging, and monitoring, along with fault tolerance strategies like circuit breakers, retries, and graceful degradation. Ultimately, the author champions understated, effective design built on well-tested components, rejecting showy techniques in favor of robust functionality.