Architecture case studies
How real kinds of products might evolve from a first version to global scale. These are plausible architectures built from public engineering patterns, not claims about any company's internals.
Building a hotel platform, from booking engine to AI operating system
The hotel domain (PMS, CRS, channel managers, OTAs, rates and inventory), how its architecture evolves with scale, and where AI agents plug in without breaking the systems of record.
How a Preply-like tutoring marketplace might evolve
A two-sided marketplace where students find tutors, book lessons across time zones, meet over video and pay, while tutors get paid out. How search, scheduling, video and money shape the architecture from one Django app to a multi-region platform.
How a Netflix-like streaming service might evolve
Pressing play should start video in about a second, anywhere, on any device, and never stall. How encoding pipelines, edge caching, recommendations and deliberate failure testing shape a streaming architecture.
How an Uber-like ride-hailing platform might evolve
Hundreds of thousands of moving cars report their position every few seconds, and a rider expects a match in seconds. How location ingestion, geospatial indexing, dispatch, surge pricing and trip consistency shape a real-time marketplace.
How an Airbnb-like stays marketplace might evolve
Millions of unique homes, each with its own calendar, price rules and host. How availability-aware search, payments held in escrow, trust and safety, and internationalisation shape a two-sided marketplace.
How a Booking.com-like travel agency might evolve
Thousands of searches for every booking, prices and availability owned by hundreds of thousands of external suppliers, and every pixel decided by an experiment. How look-to-book ratios, availability caching, supplier integrations and A/B testing shape an OTA.
How a Stripe-like payments platform might evolve
Developers integrate once and expect money to move correctly forever. How API design, idempotency keys, double-entry ledgers, strong consistency and reliable webhooks shape a payments platform.
How a Shopify-like commerce platform might evolve
Millions of independent stores on one platform, and any one of them can receive a flash sale bigger than most companies' Black Friday. How multi-tenancy, pods of shards, traffic spikes and checkout reliability shape a commerce platform.
How a Slack-like workplace messenger might evolve
A message typed in one office must appear on every member's screen within a fraction of a second, be searchable forever, and respect enterprise permissions. How persistent connections, channel fan-out, search and compliance shape a workplace messenger.
How a Discord-like community platform might evolve
Servers with a million members, voice rooms where every millisecond counts, and trillions of stored messages. How massive fan-out, voice over UDP and WebRTC, message storage at scale and presence shape a community platform.
How a Spotify-like music service might evolve
A catalogue of tens of millions of tracks, playback that starts instantly, and recommendations that feel personal. How catalogue management, audio delivery, ML pipelines and autonomous teams shape each other.