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Digs

Searching X architecture returns material written to be found by that query, which means tutorials and vendor pages. The material worth having was written by an engineer explaining a real system to their peers, and it uses different words. A dig is what comes back from going after that layer on one topic: the architecture reconstructed across real systems, the decisions and the conditions that flip them, what actually broke, and numbers you can plan against. Every claim is graded, linked and dated.

90 field guides 2433 graded sources 419 postmortems 8 categories
All AI & LLM Systems8 Data Platforms12 Distributed Systems10 Platform & Infrastructure24 Integration & APIs11 Security & Identity8 Reliability & Operations11 Cost & Efficiency6

API design and gateways, eventing, messaging contracts and service integration.

Integration & APIs 11 Oct 2026

What the vendor cannot host, you will maintain: ten years of Alibaba's published middleware

A decade of Alibaba's published middleware, for architects choosing which parts of their own system to delegate to a large company's components. The record shows the servers (registry, broker, coordinator) sti…

What surprised meThe final act of a 15-year JSON library was a jar uploaded to Maven Central at 07:24 on 29 July 2026, hours before its repository went read-only, wit…
36 sources · 9 organisations · 6 postmortems 33 min read
open-sourcedependenciesservice-governancesupply-chaindeprecation
Integration & APIs 10 Oct 2026

Swapping the system behind the name: ten years of LinkedIn

LinkedIn wrote Kafka, published it, and in 2025 announced its replacement. Over the same decade it also left its own RPC framework, its own service discovery format, its own key-value store and its single stre…

What surprised meXinfra, the layer that lets topics move off Kafka, was first built as znodes inside LinkedIn's Kafka fork in October 2023, twenty months before North…
28 sources · 15 organisations · 3 postmortems 33 min read
kafkamigrationcompatibilityrpcservice-discovery
Integration & APIs 08 Oct 2026

When every client reconnects at once

Reconstructs the connection layer from GitLab's public incident tracker (144,000 sessions reset, fleet 100 to 335 pods), the matrix.org thundering-herd postmortem, and the contracts Discord, Netflix, gRPC, XMP…

What surprised meThe operators best at surviving reconnect storms cause disconnects on purpose: Netflix's gateway gives every connection a randomized maximum lifetime…
24 sources · 14 organisations · 4 postmortems 27 min read
websocketsrealtimereconnectbackpressuresession-resumption
Integration & APIs 02 Oct 2026

The contract held, the clients broke: ten years of Stripe's API

A decade of one company's interface, read entirely from repository artefacts: a specification republished 2,535 times, two spec variants that disagree in both directions, generator and spec pins inside each cl…

What surprised meThe promise held at the HTTP boundary and the breakage moved into the client libraries: the median interval between breaking client majors fell from …
24 sources · 3 organisations · 8 postmortems 34 min read
api-versioningopenapicode-generationbackwards-compatibilitysdks
Integration & APIs 01 Oct 2026

The cursor is a lease, not a bookmark: paginating the unbounded list

Every API that lists anything eventually meets a collection that does not fit in one response, and the paging scheme it picks becomes a public contract. This guide reconstructs how Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, G…

What surprised meThe expensive requests are not the deep pages: page one is the memory bomb (a 90 GB apiserver spike came from first pages, not deep ones) and the tot…
21 sources · 9 organisations · 2 postmortems 26 min read
paginationapi-designcursorskuberneteselasticsearch
Integration & APIs 23 Sep 2026

Putting the services back together: ten years of Airbnb, read from its own artefacts

Reconstructs a decade of one company's architecture from artefacts rather than announcements: release timestamps on five package registries, archive notices, in-repository design documents and two security adv…

What surprised meThe remedy decayed the same way the disease did: four years after Viaduct was started to fix microservice sprawl, Airbnb rebuilt it from the ground u…
28 sources · 4 organisations · 3 postmortems 29 min read
airbnbgraphqlmicroservicesmodularityarchaeology
Integration & APIs 22 Sep 2026

Making the client carry it: ten years of Discord's gateway contract

A fanout platform pays for connected consumers multiplied by events, and it cannot deploy a fix to consumers it does not own. This guide reconstructs the six controls Discord added to its gateway contract over…

What surprised meEvery capability Discord took back had a pull-shaped substitute shipped first: interactions landed in December 2020, twenty months before message con…
28 sources · 7 organisations · 4 postmortems 31 min read
websocketfanoutapi-versioningrate-limitingdeprecation
Integration & APIs 09 Sep 2026

The reference architecture Netflix retired

Between 2013 and 2016 the industry copied one company's answer to service-to-service communication: discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking and configuration shipped as client libraries compiled into every…

What surprised meRibbon's own status notice marks four of its nine published modules as not used internally and says the production ones were wrapped in an internal c…
26 sources · 7 organisations · 4 postmortems 32 min read
service-discoveryresilienceapi-gatewaycontrol-planeopen-source-risk
Integration & APIs 07 Sep 2026

The retry you are counting on was never promised

Reconstructs the sender's side of webhook delivery from GitLab's incident reviews and shipped source, GitHub's staff answers, three open-source delivery services and the Standard Webhooks specification. An arc…

What surprised meGitHub and GitLab, whose webhooks trigger most of the world's CI, do not retry failed deliveries at all; the at-least-once guarantee everyone assumes…
24 sources · 10 organisations · 4 postmortems 28 min read
webhookseventingretriescircuit-breakerdelivery