ByteByteGo
blog.bytebytego.com · Company blog · on HN since 2022
ByteByteGo is a newsletter on large-scale system design, covering architectures of companies like Twitter, Shopify, Discord, and Cursor.
What HN saysCommenters often recommend it in newsletter lists, praising its broad range of explanations on software design topics, though one says the content is often very abbreviated.
56HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
52stories submitted
465story points
3 months agolast shared
2022people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1ByteByteGo – Newsletter covering topics and trends in large-scale system design8 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Twitter Architecture 2022 vs. 20124 people · 25 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 3How Shopify Manages Its Petabyte Scale MySQL Database2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 4Understanding Database Types2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews1 people · 286 points · first shared 2022 · 79 comments on HN
- 6Discord Serves 15M Users on One Server1 people · 58 points · first shared 2024 · 7 comments on HN
- 7How Cursor Serves Billions of AI Code Completions Every Day1 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8Grab's Migration from Go to Rust Cut Costs by 70%1 people · 6 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Algorithms you should know for System Design1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 10Shopify Tech Stack1 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 11Why is Redis so fast? (2022)1 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 12Cloudflare's Trillion-Message Kafka Infrastructure: A Deep Dive1 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 13Figma Design to Code, Code to Design: Clearly Explained1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 14ChatGPT Optimizes Its Agent Loop: Harness, API, and Inference1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 15How Facebook served billions of requests per second Using Memcached1 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
adubois1 · 2023-07-10
I can recommend:
https://blog.bytebytego.com/
https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/
https://www.oreilly.com/emails/newsletters/
https://ardalis.com/tips
no_wizard · 2023-07-10
Huge fan of Pragmatic Engineer as well.
I also subscribe to:
- Hardcore Software[0]
- ByeByteGo[1]
- JavaScript Weekly[2]
- Bytes[3]
[0]: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/
[1]: https://blog.bytebytego.com/
[2]: https://javascriptweekly.com/
[3]: https://bytes.dev/
mindwork · 2023-07-12
- https://golangweekly.com/
- https://blog.bytebytego.com/
- Inside Tech
- TLDR Web Dev
A mix of news and tech articles
dylanlacom · 2023-07-10
I’ve been enjoying the ByteByteGo newsletter. The content is often very abbreviated, but the breadth of topics touched on keeps it interesting. I always learn a little bit about something new.
https://blog.bytebytego.com/
idrios · 2022-10-02
ByteByteGo https://blog.bytebytego.com/
A ton of explanations of various software design patterns, architectures, deep explanations of things a lot of developers will only understand at a higher level like HTTPS, proxies, SQL, how live streaming works, how credit card payments work. It's a fountain of knowledge.
the_arun · 2022-07-07
Here are few more:
1. http://highscalability.com/
2. https://www.infoq.com/architecture-design/presentations/
3. https://blog.bytebytego.com/ - the book from same author is a good starting point too
4. https://gist.github.com/vasanthk/485d1c25737e8e72759f
General search on Google & YouTube also will get you ton of materials.
realprimoh · 2023-12-15
Learning by doing is obviously the best way, but not every role has that kind of opportunity. You can build something on the side and scale it, but it's easier to just do that in a company :)
I'm no expert on system architecture, but I have noticed that reading a lot of docs and blogs on how other companies do things successfully has helped me:
Quastor: quastor.org - Engineering blog posts and summaries
Engineer's Codex: read.engineerscodex.com - Case studies and summaries of Big Tech systems and software architectures
SWE Quiz: swequiz.com - Bunch of useful questions that has helped me a lot at work
TLDR Web Dev: tldr.tech/webdev - Good for keeping up on engineering-specific stuff in general.
I have a Feedly set up with these blogs too: https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/79-engineering-blogs-to-level-up
ByteByteGo is good too, though that's an obvious one that everyone already knows about.
swyx · 2022-11-06
So there's two things here: TILs and projects. I'm running a dev writers' retreat next week and happen to be thinking about this, want to suggest more:
- Superlatives: An interesting story about the first/last/best/worst experience when you did X. You see a lot of these in Rachelbythebay's work (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&… . Mtlynch focuses more on documenting his journey semi-realtime (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&…
- Data & News: This is a lot of work but collect data for yourself and publish it for others and others will find that useful. This is the strategy I am adopting for AI stuff https://lspace.swyx.io/p/open-source-ai. Dan Luu does this a lot to back up his work https://danluu.com/ The cutting edge of data is news, and you can see this on Gergely's substack (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/) but you're basically a journalist at that point
- How $POPULAR_THING Works: This is Fly.io's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&q… and Alex Xu's strategy https://blog.bytebytego.com/
- Overviews: What your part of the dev ecosystem looks like to you. It'll never be perfect, it can't be. Some folks on HN will tear you to shreds for missing something obvious. But it will be immensely helpful to people just behind you in…
syntaxing · 2025-02-23
I’ve been tempted to get it and curious to hear any review of the book. I decided to get Alex Xu’s Coding Interview Pattern [1] instead which I’ve been really enjoying.
[1] https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/my-new-book-coding-interview-patterns
tekno45 · 2024-03-28
dventimihasura · 2024-03-08
Incidentally, I see no evidence in those links or elsewhere that either Walmart or Netflix is using node to meditate interactions with upstream data sources. What I do see elsewhere is the usual suspects: some databases and message queues, and then lots of Java
https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/ep76-netflixs-tech-stack
mtmail · 2022-11-19
The author Alex Xu also made a blog post https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/twitter-architecture-2022-vs-2012 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33671932)