Bright Yellow

by Ines Panker

Who am I

Hi, my name is Ines Panker. I build software, speak at conferences across Europe, and write this blog.

About Me

My Talks
Failing APIs, broken deploys, and observations about the human at work, building software.

Archive of all posts

Scaling a System

Scaling a System

In 2019, I wrote a 2-part series on how a system grows from 1 user to 100 million users. Unfortunatelly, times move on and in IT 7 years is a lifespan.

So this is the redo. As a series this time. I’m looking at various aspects of scaling your system, as your system is becoming more popular.

  • Scaling a System

    System Design Vocabulary

    Sep 17, 2026• Scaling a System System Design

    Words are a funny thing. On the one hand we must name things in code...

Sources cited in this series 📚

  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann)
  • How to do distributed locking (Martin Kleppmann)
  • Release It! 2nd edition (Michael T. Nygard)
  • Site Reliability Engineering (Google)
  • The System Design Primer
  • Wikipedia: ACID
  • Wikipedia: Cache stampede
  • Wikipedia: CAP theorem
  • Wikipedia: Conway's law
  • Wikipedia: Idempotence
  • Wikipedia: Little's law
  • Wikipedia: Optimistic concurrency control
  • Wikipedia: Thundering herd problem

Where next? 🧭

Series
APIAPI Resilience PatternsBuilding Blocks CollectionWhy do smart devs write silly code?Scaling a SystemSelf-Documenting CodeThe Algorithm Decided
Topics
AlgorithmsCeleryCode PatternsCode StyleDatabaseEngineering ResearchGitMastering TimeNetworkingOpinionPeopleSoftware Design PrinciplesStatisticsSystem DesignTechnical WritingTools

Crafted by me, during odd hours

© 2026 Ines Panker

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