Weekly · for software engineers
Engineering judgment,
one edition a week.
Writing code is one thing. Deciding how a system should scale, where it will fail, and what it will cost is where the work gets interesting. Byte-Sized Design covers those decisions.
43,000+ subscribers · 150+ editions · published since 2023
What is Byte-Sized Design?
Byte-Sized Design is a weekly newsletter for software engineers covering system design, real-world architecture, incident post-mortems and engineering careers. Each edition takes one system or one decision and works through the trade-offs behind it, with a stated opinion on whether the call was right.
Editions assume you have shipped software before. We skip the tutorial on what a cache or an index is and spend the length on the specialised parts: why the consistency model forced a particular partitioning scheme, what the migration cost in engineer-months, which alternative would have been cheaper. How we research and source editions is written up in full.
Real-world systems
How companies at scale actually solved a problem, including the parts they got wrong on the first attempt.
Post-mortems
Public incident write-ups read closely, with the failure chain reconstructed and the fix assessed on its merits.
System design theory
The fundamentals that change decisions: consistency models, partitioning, backpressure, failure domains.
Career
Promotion, scope, technical influence and the parts of engineering progression that nobody documents.
What can you read without subscribing?
Two reference pages are free and stay maintained: a directory of 73 company engineering blogs with working RSS feeds, and a 64-term system design glossary where every entry links to a primary source. Both are updated as companies move or abandon their blogs.
Directory
73 engineering blogs worth reading
Every entry says what the blog is good at, what to skip, and whether it still publishes. 48 have working RSS feeds.
Glossary
64 system design terms
Definitions written for engineers who will be asked to defend the choice in a design review, each with a link to the paper, doc or post-mortem it comes from.