Best of ByteByteGo — 2025

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ByteByteGo·1y
EP157: How to Learn Backend Development?
Backend development involves understanding the differences between backend and frontend, choosing appropriate programming languages (Java, Python, JS, Go, Rust, C#), working with various types of databases (SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL), learning about different API types (REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP) and authentication methods (JWT, OAuth2, API keys). Additionally, it includes knowledge of server hosting services, containerization, server setup, and DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, IaC, and monitoring tools.
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ByteByteGo·1y
EP144: The 9 Algorithms That Dominate Our World
Explore the 9 algorithms that dominate our world, understand the role of an API gateway in system design, learn how gRPC works, and compare Docker with Kubernetes for managing containerized applications. Also, review various API architecture styles and get insights into CI/CD pipeline and different app architecture patterns.
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ByteByteGo·1y
EP150: 12 Algorithms for System Design Interviews
Learn about 12 key algorithms used in system design interviews, including Bloom Filter, Geohash, and Consistent Hashing. Understand the workings of Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration platform, and explore the architecture of PostgreSQL, the popular database system. Additionally, discover important tips for API security.
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ByteByteGo·1y
EP147: The Ultimate API Learning Roadmap
APIs are essential for internet communication, and developers must understand them. The roadmap covers the introduction, terminologies, API styles, authentication techniques, documentation tools, key features, performance techniques, gateways, implementation frameworks, and integration patterns. Learn to build and maintain efficient and effective APIs with this comprehensive guide.
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ByteByteGo·34w
EP177: The Modern Software Stack
Explores the 9 layers of modern software architecture from presentation to infrastructure, explains the key differences between concurrency and parallelism in computing, compares JWT and PASETO authentication tokens, provides a Linux Cron scheduling cheatsheet, and introduces AI agents versus Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI system integration.
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ByteByteGo·1y
EP158: How to Learn API Development
Key tips for learning API development including fundamentals, request/response handling, authentication and security, and deployment. A focus on AI coding aids like Augment Agent, and significant coding tools for 2025. Also covers network protocol dependencies and essential design patterns. ByteByteGo is hiring for a sales and partnerships lead.
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ByteByteGo·44w
Shopify Tech Stack
Shopify processes massive scale with 173 billion requests on Black Friday using a tech stack built on Ruby on Rails, React, MySQL, and Kafka. The platform uses a modular monolith architecture with strict component boundaries, database sharding through isolated pods, and extensive tooling investments including YJIT compiler and Sorbet type checker. The infrastructure handles 284 million requests per minute at peak, 66 million Kafka messages per second, and processes 216 million ML embeddings daily for semantic search, all while maintaining developer productivity through comprehensive CI/CD pipelines and observability tools.
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ByteByteGo·1y
EP156: Software Architect Knowledge Map
Becoming a Software Architect involves mastering programming languages, gaining proficiency in essential tools, understanding key design and architectural principles, and acquiring knowledge in platforms, data analytics, networking, and security. Supporting skills such as decision-making, communication, and leadership are also crucial for a well-rounded skill set.
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ByteByteGo·1y
EP151: 24 Good Resources to Learn Software Architecture in 2025
ByteByteGo Newsletter shares 24 valuable resources for learning software architecture in 2025, including books, tech blogs, YouTube channels, and whitepapers. It also compares API styles (SOAP vs REST vs GraphQL vs RPC) and AWS services (SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge vs Kinesis). Additionally, it outlines methods to enhance API performance and introduces Grok-3, a powerful AI developed by xAI.
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ByteByteGo·1y
What Is the Most Popular Open-Source AI Stack?
Open-source AI provides freedom to experiment and develop without proprietary restrictions with frameworks and tools like Next.js, Streamlit, Gradio, and FastAPI. The data layer involves retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, and tools for diverse file formats. The back end includes FastAPI, Langchain, Metaflow, and OLama, facilitating scalable AI operations. The ecosystem also includes community-driven models from Hugging Face and dynamic LLMs like Mistral and DeepSeek.
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ByteByteGo·50w
How WhatsApp Handles 40 Billion Messages Per Day
WhatsApp manages to handle nearly 40 billion daily messages by utilizing a robust backend architecture with simplicity, asynchronicity, and isolation at its core. Erlang is pivotal, offering lightweight concurrency, fault isolation, and efficient message routing. The architecture benefits from smart partitioning, resiliency under failures, seamless upgrades, and focused quality control, all managed by a small engineering team. Database design favors speed with in-memory key-value stores and async writes, while backend systems are structurally isolated to ensure reliability.
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ByteByteGo·1y
EP146: The Open Source AI Stack
The open-source AI stack provides numerous tools and frameworks across various components including Frontend, Embeddings, Backend, Data Retrieval, and Large-Language Models, making AI development accessible without heavy costs. Important algorithms for system design interviews and comparisons of authentication methods like Cookies, Sessions, JWT, and PASETO are discussed. Additionally, TikTok's approach to managing a 200K file frontend MonoRepo with the Sparo tool highlights significant performance optimizations in Git operations.
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ByteByteGo·19w
How Reddit Migrated Comments Functionality from Python to Go
Reddit migrated their comments functionality from a legacy Python monolith to a Go microservice, handling their largest dataset and highest write throughput. The migration used "tap compare" for read operations and "sister datastores" for writes, allowing validation with real traffic while maintaining zero risk. Key challenges included cross-language serialization issues, database access pattern differences, and race conditions in verification. The migration succeeded with zero user disruption and delivered an unexpected bonus: p99 latency was cut in half, dropping from occasional 15-second spikes to consistently under 100 milliseconds.
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ByteByteGo·50w
EP161: A Cheatsheet on REST API Design Best Practices
REST API design involves best practices such as using resource-oriented paths, applying HTTP verbs properly, maintaining API versioning, and utilizing standard error codes. Ensuring APIs are idempotent and supporting pagination can enhance performance and reliability. Security measures like using API Keys, JWTs, OAuth2, and HTTPS are crucial for protecting APIs in production.
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ByteByteGo·1y
How YouTube Supports Billions of Users with MySQL and Vitess
YouTube scaled its backend to manage billions of users by implementing Vitess on top of MySQL. Vitess acts as a smart intermediary, enabling horizontal scaling, efficient query routing, and automated database management tasks. Key strategies included replication, sharding, vertical splitting, and enhancements like connection pooling, query safety mechanisms, and a specialized row cache. These measures addressed issues like replication lag, data consistency, and high write loads, ensuring YouTube's backend remained efficient and resilient.
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ByteByteGo·40w
EP171: The Generative AI Tech Stack
Comprehensive overview of the generative AI technology stack, covering nine key components from cloud infrastructure and foundational models to safety and monitoring tools. Also includes curated resources for learning software architecture, database indexing fundamentals, AI agent development roadmap, and an introduction to Model Context Protocol servers for connecting AI models to external tools and services.
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ByteByteGo·44w
EP167: Top 20 AI Concepts You Should Know
A comprehensive overview of 20 essential AI concepts including machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, NLP, computer vision, and transformers. Also covers the AI application stack for building RAG applications, featuring components like large language models, frameworks, vector databases, data extraction tools, and text embeddings. Additionally includes insights into Shopify's tech stack architecture and job opportunities in AI and software engineering.
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ByteByteGo·42w
7 System Design Concepts Explained in 10 Minutes
Seven fundamental concepts power reliable distributed systems: CAP theorem forces choosing between consistency and availability during network partitions, eventual consistency enables high performance through delayed convergence, load balancers distribute traffic using Layer 4 or Layer 7 strategies, consistent hashing minimizes data movement when scaling nodes, circuit breakers prevent cascade failures by blocking requests to failing services, rate limiting protects against overload using token bucket or sliding window algorithms, and monitoring provides visibility through metrics, logs, traces, and events to maintain system health.
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ByteByteGo·37w
EP174: 16 Coding Patterns That Make Interviews Easy
A comprehensive guide covering 16 essential coding patterns for technical interviews, including two-pointer technique, sliding window, dynamic programming, and graph algorithms. Also provides a structured learning path for mastering databases, explains how HTTPS works with encryption protocols, and traces Netflix's scaling evolution from monolith to microservices architecture.
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ByteByteGo·39w
How Tinder’s API Gateway Handles A Billion Swipes Per Day
Tinder built TAG (Tinder API Gateway), a custom JVM-based framework on Spring Cloud Gateway, to handle over a billion swipes daily. The solution replaced fragmented third-party gateways with a unified framework that allows each team to deploy independent gateway instances. TAG features configuration-driven routing, global filters for geolocation and session management, custom middleware support, and integration with Envoy service mesh. The system processes requests through a defined pipeline including reverse geo IP lookup, request scanning, session validation, and configurable pre/post filters, enabling faster development cycles while maintaining security and performance at scale.
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ByteByteGo·47w
EP164: JWT Simply Explained
JSON Web Tokens (JWT) provide a secure method for transmitting information between parties using an open standard. They are primarily used for authentication and authorization. A JWT comprises a header, payload, and signature, with two signature types: symmetric and asymmetric, based on the use of secret and public keys. JWTs are integral to modern web applications, ensuring secure data exchange.
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ByteByteGo·36w
EP175: What is the SOLID Principle?
SOLID principles provide five guidelines for creating maintainable software: Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, and Dependency Inversion. The post also covers HTTP status code categories (1xx-5xx), Clean Architecture's four-layer structure with inward dependencies, Docker's client-host-registry architecture, and the five-stage process of how Large Language Models work from data collection to deployment.
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ByteByteGo·34w
How LLMs See Images, Audio, and More
Modern AI systems process images, audio, and video by converting them into discrete tokens, similar to text processing. Images use patch embeddings (dividing into grid squares), vector quantization (learning visual codebooks), or contrastive embeddings. Audio employs neural codecs for quality preservation, ASR transcription for semantic content, or hierarchical approaches for multi-scale representation. Each tokenization method involves trade-offs between computational efficiency, information preservation, and semantic understanding, with the optimal choice depending on specific use cases and requirements.
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ByteByteGo·49w
EP162: 9 Clean Code Principles To Keep In Mind
Explore nine key principles for writing clean code, including using meaningful names, ensuring each function has one responsibility, avoiding magic numbers, employing descriptive booleans, and keeping code dry by reducing duplication. These guidelines help improve code readability and maintainability.
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ByteByteGo·37w
How Cursor Serves Billions of AI Code Completions Every Day
Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built on VS Code that serves billions of AI completions daily. It features real-time code autocomplete, AI chat assistance, inline editing, and background agents that work in the cloud. The system handles over 1 million queries per second using a distributed infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP, with privacy-focused codebase indexing through vector embeddings. Cursor integrates multiple AI models including GPT-4, Claude, and custom fine-tuned models to provide intelligent coding assistance while maintaining security through encryption and ephemeral data handling.
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