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Payments and commerce
e-commerce
e-commerce cart, inventory and orders
Shopify, Amazon
System
Techniques · 21
Primitives · 65
e-commerce
CDN and edge
cloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Partitioned commit log
distributed · medium: A topic split into replicated append-only partitions: key hash keeps per-key order, offsets give position, and a high watermark limits readers to fully replicated records.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
Saga pattern
distributed · medium: Split a cross-service operation into local transactions, each paired with an undo; on failure run the undos in reverse, or retry forward.
›
Transactional outbox
distributed · medium: Write the event as a row in the same local transaction as the state change; a relay publishes it later at-least-once, so state and events never diverge.
›
Inventory reservation
finance · medium: Reserving stock with TTL holds, release on timeout and no overselling under contention
Idempotency keys
finance · low: Client-chosen unique key per logical operation, stored with a request fingerprint and the final response, so retries replay the first result instead of acting twice.
›
Sharded counters
concurrency · low: Split one hot counter into per-core or per-thread cells on separate cache lines; increments stay local and reads sum the cells.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Largest remainder rounding
finance · low: Splitting an amount into parts that sum exactly (largest remainder / Hamilton) for allocations, splits and prorations
Money representation
finance · low: Store money as integer minor units with an explicit currency exponent, compute in wider integers, and round once with a named rounding mode.
›
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Gapless sequence numbers
storage · low: Gap-free, monotonic numbering (invoices, journal entries) under concurrency and rollbacks
Optimistic concurrency control
storage · low: Run transactions without locks, record what they read, and validate at commit that nothing changed; fastest when conflicts are rare.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
Token bucket
systems · low: A bucket of up to b tokens refilled at rate r; requests spend tokens, enforcing an average rate while allowing bursts of b.
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W-TinyLFU
systems · low: An LRU window plus segmented LRU, guarded by a 4-bit Count-Min sketch that admits a newcomer only if it beats the victim's frequency.
›
HTTP caching semantics
networking · low: The rules (RFC 9111) that decide whether a stored response is still fresh, and how a cheap conditional request revalidates it when it is not.
›
Cooperative scheduling
concurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler
Record replay
distributed · low: Record every nondeterministic input (time, randomness, I/O, model and tool outputs, per-tick player input) and re-execute deterministically for debugging, replays and state rebuild
PRNGs (PCG, xoshiro)
numerics · low: Small, fast, statistically strong non-cryptographic generators: PCG32 and xoshiro256**, with seeding, parallel streams and unbiased ranges.
›
+ 14 more techniques
+ 49 more primitives
System
Techniques · 21
Primitives · 65
e-commerce
CDN and edge
cloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Partitioned commit log
distributed · medium: A topic split into replicated append-only partitions: key hash keeps per-key order, offsets give position, and a high watermark limits readers to fully replicated records.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
Saga pattern
distributed · medium: Split a cross-service operation into local transactions, each paired with an undo; on failure run the undos in reverse, or retry forward.
›
Transactional outbox
distributed · medium: Write the event as a row in the same local transaction as the state change; a relay publishes it later at-least-once, so state and events never diverge.
›
Inventory reservation
finance · medium: Reserving stock with TTL holds, release on timeout and no overselling under contention
Order lifecycle state machine
finance · medium: Order states (new, partial fill, cancel/replace, rejected, expired) with strict transitions and idempotent events
Payment state machine
finance · medium: Persisted state machine for a payment lifecycle (authorize, capture, void, refund) that treats timeouts as unknown, retries with the same key and applies webhooks idempotently.
›
Coverage-guided fuzzing
security · medium: Mutate inputs, run an instrumented target, and keep any input that reaches a new code edge; feedback turns blind guessing into incremental search.
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Change data capture
storage · medium: Decode the database's own commit log into row-change events in commit order, with a resume position, so any consumer can mirror the data exactly.
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MVCC
storage · medium: Keep timestamped versions of each row so readers see a consistent snapshot without blocking writers; the default concurrency control in modern databases.
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Point-in-time recovery
storage · medium: Periodic base backups plus a continuously archived change log let you rebuild the state as of any instant, then branch from there.
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Delta debugging
compilers · medium: Ddmin minimization of failing inputs or change sets
Durable job queue
distributed · medium: Persisted tasks that workers lease for a visibility timeout, ack on success and retry with backoff; at-least-once execution that survives worker and queue crashes.
›
Fault injection
distributed · medium: Inject latency, errors, kills and partitions via proxies, netem or hooks
Incremental sync cursors
distributed · medium: The client keeps one opaque token; each pull returns only the changes after it plus the next token, so sync cost scales with what changed, not with the dataset.
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TLS 1.3
security · medium: The standard encrypted, authenticated transport; one round trip, only forward-secret AEAD suites, and little left to misconfigure.
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ARIES recovery
storage · medium: Three-pass crash recovery (analysis, redo, undo) for steal/no-force buffer pools; repeats history, then rolls back losers with compensation log records.
›
Syscall interception
security · medium: Intercept syscalls via ptrace, seccomp user notify or a user-space kernel
Buffer pool
storage · medium: The database's own page cache (frames, page table, pin counts, dirty bits, replacement) so it, not the OS, controls eviction, write order and I/O.
›
Idempotency keys
finance · low: Client-chosen unique key per logical operation, stored with a request fingerprint and the final response, so retries replay the first result instead of acting twice.
›
Sharded counters
concurrency · low: Split one hot counter into per-core or per-thread cells on separate cache lines; increments stay local and reads sum the cells.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Largest remainder rounding
finance · low: Splitting an amount into parts that sum exactly (largest remainder / Hamilton) for allocations, splits and prorations
Money representation
finance · low: Store money as integer minor units with an explicit currency exponent, compute in wider integers, and round once with a named rounding mode.
›
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Gapless sequence numbers
storage · low: Gap-free, monotonic numbering (invoices, journal entries) under concurrency and rollbacks
Optimistic concurrency control
storage · low: Run transactions without locks, record what they read, and validate at commit that nothing changed; fastest when conflicts are rare.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
Token bucket
systems · low: A bucket of up to b tokens refilled at rate r; requests spend tokens, enforcing an average rate while allowing bursts of b.
›
W-TinyLFU
systems · low: An LRU window plus segmented LRU, guarded by a 4-bit Count-Min sketch that admits a newcomer only if it beats the victim's frequency.
›
HTTP caching semantics
networking · low: The rules (RFC 9111) that decide whether a stored response is still fresh, and how a cheap conditional request revalidates it when it is not.
›
Cooperative scheduling
concurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler
Record replay
distributed · low: Record every nondeterministic input (time, randomness, I/O, model and tool outputs, per-tick player input) and re-execute deterministically for debugging, replays and state rebuild
PRNGs (PCG, xoshiro)
numerics · low: Small, fast, statistically strong non-cryptographic generators: PCG32 and xoshiro256**, with seeding, parallel streams and unbiased ranges.
›
Fast hash functions
data-structures · low: Non-cryptographic hashes built from 64×64→128-bit multiplies and xor-shifts; pick by key size, trust level and whether the hash is persisted.
›
Consumer offsets
distributed · low: Each consumer group stores one integer per partition, the next position to read, so a restarted consumer resumes where it left off with at-least-once delivery.
›
Segmented log
distributed · low: Split an append-only log into files named by their first offset, write only the newest, and find any record by binary search plus a sparse index.
›
Zero-copy I/O
networking · low: Move bytes between files, sockets and NICs by passing page references instead of copying through user space: sendfile, splice, MSG_ZEROCOPY, kTLS.
›
Leases
distributed · low: A lock that expires on its own: bounded-time ownership that survives crashes and partitions, given bounded clock drift and fencing tokens on writes.
›
Write-ahead log
storage · low: Append each change to a checksummed sequential log and fsync it before touching data pages; the basis of crash durability in nearly every database.
›
Health checking
systems · low: Decide per backend whether to route to it using probes and real-traffic errors, with consecutive-count hysteresis, capped ejection and a panic fallback.
›
Event deduplication window
distributed · low: Keep the ids of recently accepted events for a time window and drop repeats; memory stays bounded by rotating time buckets instead of per-entry timers.
›
Conditional writes
distributed · low: Put-if-absent / if-match compare-and-swap on objects or keys as a commit primitive
Hierarchical timing wheel
systems · low: Timers bucketed by expiry into wheels of slots, coarser wheels for far deadlines: O(1) insert and cancel for millions of timeouts.
›
FIX protocol (session layer)
finance · low: Tag=value order-entry protocol over TCP with per-direction sequence numbers, heartbeats and resend so sessions survive disconnects without losing or duplicating orders.
›
Hierarchical state machine
systems · low: Nest states so a substate inherits its parent's reactions and only overrides what differs, with ordered entry and exit actions along the path.
›
Event sourcing
finance · low: Persist state changes as an append-only stream of immutable events per entity; current state is a fold over them, guarded by expected-version appends.
›
Exponential backoff with jitter
systems · low: Retry after delays that grow geometrically and are randomized, so failed clients spread out instead of hammering a recovering service in synchronized waves.
›
Code coverage instrumentation
compilers · low: Insert counters into compiled code to record which blocks, edges or lines ran; a spanning tree of the control-flow graph cuts the counters needed.
›
Sanitizers
security · low: ASan/UBSan/TSan shadow memory and instrumentation to catch memory bugs
Message sequence numbers
distributed · low: A per-stream counter on every message lets the receiver detect loss, duplicates and reordering, ack cheaply and resume after reconnect with "send from N".
›
Object storage
cloud · low: S3-compatible blob storage at cents per GB-month with 11 nines durability; pick by egress price, request price and latency, not by storage price alone.
›
Copy on write snapshots
storage · low: Point-in-time snapshots by sharing pages/extents and copying only on write
Failure bisection
search-sort · low: Binary search over commits, batches or inputs to isolate a failure
Dead-letter queue
distributed · low: A side queue for messages that keep failing: after N delivery attempts or a permanent error, park them with the reason so the main queue keeps moving.
›
Transparent interception
networking · low: Redirect traffic to a local proxy (iptables TPROXY/REDIRECT, eBPF) without app changes
Cursor pagination
networking · low: Keyset/opaque-cursor pagination for stable incremental reads from APIs and tables
AEAD (AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305)
security · low: Authenticated encryption that encrypts and detects tampering in one call; the only kind of symmetric encryption you should use.
›
Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)
security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.
›
ECDH key exchange (X25519, P-256)
security · low: Each side multiplies the other's public curve point by its own scalar and both get the same point; always validate the peer key and run the result through a KDF.
›
HKDF key derivation (extract-and-ex…
security · low: HMAC-based two-step key derivation: extract a uniform pseudorandom key from any secret, then expand it into as many context-bound keys as you need.
›
X509 certificates
security · low: Certificate chains, path validation, SANs, revocation and short-lived issuance
Ebpf
hardware-os · low: Verified in-kernel programs on hooks (kprobes, XDP, tc) with maps
Ptrace process control
hardware-os · low: Ptrace: attach, read and write registers and memory, single-step, intercept signals
Seccomp bpf
security · low: Syscall filtering with seccomp BPF programs
fsync, O_DSYNC and O_DIRECT
hardware-os · low: What fsync, fdatasync, O_DSYNC, O_DIRECT and F_FULLFSYNC really guarantee on Linux and macOS, and the exact call sequences for crash-safe files.
›
LRU and CLOCK
systems · low: LRU evicts the least recently used entry via hash map plus linked list; CLOCK approximates it with a reference bit, so hits take no lock.
›
S3-FIFO
systems · low: Three FIFO queues (small, main, ghost) that evict one-hit wonders quickly and keep reused objects; low miss ratios with no list moves on hits.
›
Control-flow graph
compilers · low: Split a linear instruction list into basic blocks and connect them by jumps; the graph every optimizer, SSA builder and dataflow pass walks.
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False sharing
concurrency · low: Independent variables written by different cores on one cache line force the line to bounce between cores; pad or regroup hot data to fix it.
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Memory ordering
concurrency · low: What Relaxed, Acquire, Release and SeqCst atomics actually guarantee, what they cost on x86 and ARM, and which one each pattern needs.
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d-ary heap
data-structures · low: Array heap with d children per node (d = 4 typical): half the binary heap's depth, siblings in one cache line, faster priority queues.
›
Fencing tokens
distributed · low: A number that grows with every lock grant and is checked by the protected resource, so a paused ex-holder's late write is rejected.
›
BFS and DFS
graphs · low: The two basic graph traversals; BFS gives hop distances and levels, DFS gives discovery/finish order for cycles, components and topological order.
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Minimum spanning tree
graphs · low: Cheapest set of edges connecting all vertices; Kruskal sorts edges and joins components with union-find, Prim grows one tree, Boruvka merges in parallel rounds.
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Union-find
graphs · low: Disjoint-set forest with union by size and path compression; merges sets and answers same-set queries in effectively constant time.
›
CPU caches and the memory hierarchy
hardware-os · low: Sizes, line widths and latencies of L1/L2/L3/DRAM on modern x86 and Apple M-series, and the data-layout rules that follow from them.
›
CRC32C checksums
hardware-os · low: The Castagnoli CRC-32 with dedicated instructions on x86 (SSE4.2) and ARMv8. It is the standard fast integrity check for storage blocks, logs and network frames.
›
SIMD programming
hardware-os · low: Process 4-16 lanes per instruction with AVX2, AVX-512 or NEON via Rust std::arch, with runtime dispatch and a portable fallback.
›
Sparse matrices (CSR)
numerics · low: Compressed sparse row stores only nonzeros as row pointers, column indices and values; SpMV streams them once, so it is memory-bandwidth bound.
›
Constant time code
security · low: Writing secret-dependent code without branches or memory lookups on secrets; constant-time compare and select
Csprng
security · low: OS-backed cryptographically secure random numbers (getrandom), and when a fast PRNG is not enough
Slab allocator
systems · low: Pre-carve pages into equal-size slots per size class with an in-place free list: O(1) alloc and free, no external fragmentation, cache-warm reuse.
›
Copy for AI
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