Episodes

Every episode, in order. Each one comes with a written companion piece, the anchor paper, and glossary cross-links.

• Episode 01coming soon

  The Saga Pattern

  Distributed transactions without two-phase commit. The 1987 pattern that still defines microservice consistency.

• Episode 02coming soon

  CQRS and Event Sourcing

  Why command/query separation and event sourcing are not the same thing — and when each one earns its complexity.

• Episode 03coming soon

  Consensus and Leader Election (Raft)

  How a cluster agrees on a single value despite failures. Raft, Paxos, and the gap between correct and understandable.

• Episode 04coming soon

  Sharding Strategies

  Range, hash, and consistent hashing. The trade-offs that determine whether your database survives the next 10× of growth.

• Episode 05coming soon

  CAP and PACELC in Practice

  CAP is the start of the conversation, not the end. PACELC is what you actually design against.

• Episode 06coming soon

  Multi-Region Failover

  Active-active, active-passive, and the realities of cross-region replication. Pat Helland's framing 18 years on.

• Episode 07coming soon

  RAG: A Distributed Search Problem with an LLM at the End

  Retrieval-augmented generation as a distributed search problem. Indexing, ranking, context windows, evals.

• Episode 08coming soon

  Vector Search Internals (HNSW, IVF, PQ)

  How HNSW, IVF, and product quantization actually find nearest neighbors at scale.

• Episode 09coming soon

  Agentic Architectures (ReAct + Tool Use)

  ReAct, tool use, and the systems patterns that make LLM agents survive contact with production.