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Saturday, 12 September 2026 Reading Room

Tech

The 5-step framework I use for any system design interview (6 worked examples)

Most people fail system design interviews by jumping straight to boxes. The fix is a fixed order: Clarify — functional + non-functional requirements, say the numbers out loud. Estimate — users, requests/sec, storage. Rough is fine; having a number is the point. High-level design — the minimum boxes that satisfy step 1. Deep-dive the hard part — the one component that makes this problem this…

dev.to ·

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Your app went viral. Adding servers made it worse. Here's why.

It's midnight, someone huge shares your app, 100,000 people show up — and the page dies. You add three servers. It gets worse .

  • 100,000 users caused app crash at midnight
  • Database bottlenecks revealed by request tracing
  • Indexing query and caching recommended to optimize

·dev.to

Prompt Caching: Why cache_control Writes But Never Reads

I turned on prompt caching for an agent loop that resends a 12K-token system prompt on every turn. Obvious win, right? Input tokens are the whole bill in a tool loop. The bill went up. Not a little.

  • Cache caching mechanism writes but never reads
  • Cache control breakpoint placed after changing content
  • Cache key invalidated by any change at breakpoint

·dev.to

The EU Machinery Regulation applies on 20 January 2027, not 14 January

If you are building anything that puts a learned policy in charge of a safety function, the date you need is 20 January 2027. A lot of secondary sources say 14 January.

  • EU Machinery Regulation delays to 20 January 2027
  • Corrigendum corrects date from 14 January
  • Annex I includes self-evolving safety components

·dev.to

My audit printed 0 of 0 and called it a pass

Three of the phases in my audit printed this: clusters=0 files=0 judged=0/0 open=0 claim=AHEAD verdict_file=absent Nothing had been examined. No verdict file existed.

  • Audit phases reported as ahead with zero output
  • Verdict of ahead declared despite empty run
  • Proposed fix: add void state for unmeasured phases

·dev.to

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