Chris Collins

Tagged “sharding”

Exploration ·

How web search works

Follow a query from the box you type it into to the ten blue links: how text becomes terms, how an inverted index stores and compresses them, how BM25 scores a match, how we know a ranking is any good, and how the whole thing is split across thousands of machines — with the tools running live between the paragraphs.

Search and retrieval

Tool ·

MongoDB replica sets and sharding, simulated

An animated MongoDB cluster in your browser: a replica set with its oplogs, elections in terms, write concern and the rollback of acknowledged w:1 writes, read concern and read preference with maxStalenessSeconds; a sharded cluster with mongos, config servers, ranges, hashed and ranged keys, zones, the balancer and jumbo ranges; a query-targeting checker and a shard-key evaluator.

Data and event platforms

Tool ·

System design interviews

Practise big-tech style system design interviews: a paced 45- or 60-minute framework with a mock interviewer, random questions and a self-scoring rubric, a back-of-the-envelope estimator, 38 reference architectures (likes, web search, webhooks, group chat, Kafka- and Dynamo-style stores, maps, a matching engine and more) as clickable diagrams with model deep-dive answers and interview cards, a live simulation of each one you can overload and break, a searchable question bank with a compare view, runnable building blocks (rate limiters, consistent hashing, Snowflake IDs, Bloom filters, fencing tokens, the outbox pattern and more) with Python, Go and Java versions, and trade-off cards.

Software engineeringData and event platforms