Build a production-flavored job queue on Postgres with SKIP LOCKED, exponential backoff, and a dead-letter queue. A substantive portfolio project that demonstrates real backend systems skill.
How to design, partition, replicate, and operate a distributed vector database for semantic search at scale — covering sharding strategies, HNSW vs. IVF, hybrid retrieval, and operational pitfalls.
How modern distributed databases turn the write-amplification problem into a throughput advantage, and what it costs you on the read path.
Build a production-shaped distributed rate limiter in Go and Redis using a token bucket algorithm. Includes runnable code, atomic Lua scripts, integration tests, and a roadmap to extend it for your CV.
LSM trees are the backbone of modern write-intensive databases like Cassandra, RocksDB, and ScyllaDB. This post walks through the architecture, compaction strategies, and tuning decisions that separate a healthy LSM deployment from a write stall.