Design on Bits, Trades & Systems https://blog.turboawesome.win/tags/design/ Recent content in Design on Bits, Trades & Systems Hugo en-us Wed, 05 Jan 2022 10:08:00 +0000 Embedding in Go: Composition Over Inheritance Done Right https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/01/embedding-in-go-composition-over-inheritance-done-right/ Wed, 05 Jan 2022 10:08:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/01/embedding-in-go-composition-over-inheritance-done-right/ Go has no inheritance, but it has embedding — a composition mechanism that promotes methods to the outer type. Understanding what embedding actually does (and what it doesn't) prevents the common mistakes. Writing Technical RFCs That Actually Get Read https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/02/writing-technical-rfcs-that-actually-get-read/ Wed, 24 Feb 2021 09:07:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/02/writing-technical-rfcs-that-actually-get-read/ Most technical RFCs fail at their primary purpose: creating alignment before building. The failures are almost always structural — missing context, buried decisions, or no clear ask. Here's the format that worked. Error Handling in Go: Patterns That Actually Work at Scale https://blog.turboawesome.win/2019/09/error-handling-in-go-patterns-that-actually-work-at-scale/ Wed, 11 Sep 2019 11:58:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2019/09/error-handling-in-go-patterns-that-actually-work-at-scale/ Go's error handling is explicit and verbose by design. At scale — hundreds of functions, multiple layers, concurrent operations — the naive patterns break down. These are the patterns that held up. What Big-Bank Engineering Taught Me About System Design https://blog.turboawesome.win/2018/08/what-big-bank-engineering-taught-me-about-system-design/ Thu, 23 Aug 2018 13:51:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2018/08/what-big-bank-engineering-taught-me-about-system-design/ Three years at a large financial institution changed how I think about failure, compliance, and the relationship between constraints and good design. Not all of the lessons are obvious. Threading Models in Java: Which One Does Your System Actually Need? https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/11/threading-models-in-java-which-one-does-your-system-actually-need/ Wed, 09 Nov 2016 10:22:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/11/threading-models-in-java-which-one-does-your-system-actually-need/ Thread-per-request, event-loop, work-stealing, single-threaded with message passing — Java supports all of them, but each optimises for different things. Choosing the wrong model means fighting the runtime rather than working with it.