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Real World Engineering Challenges

The biggest-ever global outage: lessons for software engineers
Cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike shipped a routine rule definition change to all customers, and chaos followed as 8.5M machines crashed, worldwide…
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Gergely Orosz
7
Startups on hard mode: Oxide. Part 1: Hardware
What is tougher than building a software-only or hardware-only startup? Building a combined hardware and software startup. This is what Oxide is doing…
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Gergely Orosz
6
Applied AI Software Engineering: RAG
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a common building block of AI software engineering. A deep dive into what it is, its limitations, and some…
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Gergely Orosz
 and 
Ross McNairn
10
Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges)
Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel design…
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Gergely Orosz
 and 
Elin Nilsson
Scaling ChatGPT: Five Real-World Engineering Challenges
Just one year after its launch, ChatGPT had more than 100M weekly users. In order to meet this explosive demand, the team at OpenAI had to overcome…
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Gergely Orosz
6
Building Meta’s Threads App (Real-World Engineering Challenges)
The Threads app was downloaded by more than 100M people on launch week. How did the engineering team build the app, and handle an unexpectedly intense…
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Gergely Orosz
1
Interesting Learnings from Outages (Real-World Engineering Challenges #10)
A DNS mystery at Adevinta; A failover causing an outage at GitHub; The challenge whether to do a rollback at Reddit; and the difference between public…
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Gergely Orosz
Inside Datadog’s $5M Outage (Real-World Engineering Challenges #9)
The observability provider was down for more than a day in March. What went wrong, how did the engineering team respond, and what can businesses learn…
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Gergely Orosz
4
Real-world Engineering Challenges #8: Breaking up a Monolith
A deep dive into how Khan Academy took a 1 million-line Python monolith and split it into ~40 Go services in a more than 3 year-long project.
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Gergely Orosz
4
Real-World Engineering Challenges #7: Choosing Technologies
Choosing frameworks, languages and architecture approaches at Trello, Birdie, MetalBear and Motive.
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Gergely Orosz
3
Real-World Engineering Challenges #6: Migrations
essons on migration projects from Box, Stripe, Pinterest, Doordash, LinkedIn and others.
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Gergely Orosz
Real-World Engineering Challenges #5
Resilient payments systems, large-scale data storage with OLTP and OLAP systems, platform team challenges, and more.
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Gergely Orosz
4
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