Tautik Agrahari

every time your phone shows "5 ubers within a mile" or yelp pulls up restaurants near your dot on the map, somewhere in the backend a system is solving the same problem: given a point on earth, find all the other points close to it, fast. the naive answer…

a cua (computer use agent) is just an llm that controls a browser. you give it a task like "log into some saas dashboard and screenshot the encryption settings", it takes a screenshot, sends the screenshot to claude with a list of tools (click, type, scro…

aight, let's talk about remote desktops and why the web makes everything complicated (but also kinda cool). what you'll take away quick pointers so you know what to look for as you read: vnc is just a protocol over tcp. server captures the screen, client…

dropbox is one of those apps that feels totally simple until you start designing it. you upload a file, it shows up on your other devices. share it, someone else sees it. but every step here has a real engineering question buried in it. 50GB uploads can't…

aight so today we're talking about id generators. seems boring on paper, but stay with me — this is one of those topics where every line of complexity comes from a real production problem someone hit at scale. and the cool part is the entire problem state…

the tiny number on your messaging icon: designing the unread sender count a system that looks deceptively simple on the surface but hides a bunch of interesting engineering decisions underneath. you know that little number on your messaging icon — the one…

a system that looks deceptively simple on the surface but hides a bunch of interesting engineering decisions underneath. you know the page — when you tap #sunset on instagram and see the name, total posts, and a grid of top photos. let's walk through how…

every system design conversation eventually circles back to bit.ly. it's the canonical "looks dead simple but isn't" service — take a long url, hand back a short one, redirect on click. the surface is straightforward. then you start asking how it scales to

where do remote locks even fit in?

queues are one of those things that sound dead simple from the outside. you push stuff in one end, you read it from the other end, fifo, done. but the moment you try to build anything real on top of a queue, you realize there are like five layers of decis…

scaling reads sounds boring on the tin and then you realize it's basically every system design problem in disguise. the moment your app gets even a little popular, reads outpace writes by 10×, then 100×, then 1000× — and your single database starts crying.

so we all know most databases store data in b+ trees, but why?

why another database?

Why should we care about DNS?

Caching: It's Not Just About Memory Myth-busting time : Caching doesn't mean in-memory.