System Architecture

Image by Mohammad Bagher Adib Behrooz on Unsplash Why GraphQL for data engineers, you might ask? GraphQL solved the problem of providing a distinct interface for each client by unifying it to a single API for all clients such as web, mobile, web apps. The same challenge we’re now facing in the data world, where we integrate multiple clients with numerous backend systems. So what is GraphQL? In the world of microservices and web apps, GraphQL is a popular query language and serves as a data layer. It is essentially SQL on steroids for APIs. In this article, we go through how to combine the data from all services into a single, unified API.

The struggle of having a single performant, secure, and reliable data endpoint is real.

Container registries look simple until you need to debug what was actually pushed, why a pull picked the wrong image, or why deleting a tag didn't remove anything. Learn how registries work by pushing, pulling, inspecting, and deleting image data directly through the Registry API.

Seven years of maintaining a popular open source metasearch engine taught me a great deal about privacy, community, and the fundamental limits of the metasearch approach. Here is what led me to build Hister.

I’ve always found serverless platforms a little magical. You deploy a function, send a request, and somewhere in the world, resources are…

A small tool that captures Discourse plugin UIs in CI and publishes a gallery, modeled on Penar's theme-screenshots project but pointed at plugin routes.

I turned Telegram into a homelab control center, and it's made managing my Docker containers so much easier.

Tracking Chaos: Building a Real-Time Flight Anomaly Engine with Django, Celery, and Machine Learning Imagine walking outside on a quiet afternoon. You hear a sharp roar overhead, pull out your phone …

The background behind a new test suite for a compiler and a VM where test scenarios are all written in Markdown for both human and AI consumption

Old technology is any tech that’s, well… old. Small technology is any tech that has a small footprint: doesn’t require a powerful machine to run, doesn’t have a lot of bloat, doesn’t have anti-features like spyware and tracking. Technology that is old enough is almost always small because, by modern standards, that’s all that was possible back then. Some small tech is old, some is modern. Embedded systems are an example of modern small tech development in many cases.

UUCP is a system for exchanging data and requesting remote execution. It dates back to 1979, and was primarily used over Modems using telephone landlines for most of its days of popularity. It is an Asynchronous Communication system, which transmits data from one machine to the next on the way to its destination. Each intermediate node may store the data before passing it on to the next. Before dedicated Internet lines were widely available, UUCP was used to send Usenet and Email messages.

computer command or set of programs allowing two computers to exchange files and execute commands on the remote machine

Once upon a time, computing was simple. You had files on a floppy disk. If you wanted to take them to a different computer, you ejected the disk from one machine and put it in another. It wasn&#821…

When the World Wide Web surged into existence during the 1990s, we were introduced to the problem of how to actually find something in this ever-ballooning construction zone that easily outpaced ev…

Like many people who read Hackaday, we are fairly fluent in a number of computer languages, but we have to admit it is easier to pick up languages that look like they group with things like Fortran…

Resident is an open-source sandbox runtime with hardware IO and hot reload for ESP32 devices.

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2026. 1,665 words, 18 links. By Matt Webb.

Alan Mayo frames the digital identity design choice as enhance, duplicate, or replace, and places Utah's SEDI in the

Agents, not APIs, might be the future of search.

Leveraging BERT and a class-based TF-IDF to create easily interpretable topics.

LLMs mean you still need a human in the loop, but in a different part

The Unix Way Episode 17. DTrace as the canonical answer to in-production tracing, designed at Sun by Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro and Adam Leventhal in 2003, generally available in Solaris 10 from January 2005, ported to FreeBSD by John Birrell in 7.1-RELEASE on 6 January 2009. The principle: instrument any kernel or userland probe with zero overhead when disabled and minimal overhead when enabled, with a deliberately Turing-incomplete script language so the compiler can prove every probe terminates within bounded time and memory. The Linux licence wall: DTrace was released under the CDDL, a file-level weak copyleft that accepts coexistence with any other licence; the GPL is strong copyleft and demands that any combined work be relicensed to GPL. The asymmetry is structural; the block was in the GPL's design, not the CDDL's behaviour. The Linux rebuild: BPF was already there (McCanne and Jacobson, Berkeley, 1992); Alexei Starovoitov and Daniel Borkmann generalised it into eBPF, merged in Linux 3.18 on 7 December 2014; BCC by Brenden Blanco at IO Visor arrived in 2015; bpftrace by Alastair Robertson, announced by Brendan Gregg as 'DTrace 2.0 for Linux' in October 2018. The bridge figure is Brendan Gregg himself, co-author of the 2011 DTrace book with Jim Mauro at Sun/Joyent and of the 2019 BPF Performance Tools book at Netflix. The shape was always the same; the journey was a great deal longer.

I wanted to find out how Cities: Skylines drives the constant motion you see in a growing city - residents looking for jobs, tourists visiting attractions, garbage trucks doing their rounds, even cims looking for love - and I couldn’t find much written up about it. So I decompiled the game and dug in. What I found is that almost every interaction in the game runs through a single, elegant system: a stock-market-style trading market.

Most programming tutorials start with syntax, but the real language starts with data layout, ownership, allocation, and what values actually look like in memory.

We rebuilt the Dodo Payments CLI from the ground up - an interactive TUI, a local AI assistant over MCP, encrypted credentials, and offline webhook testing. Here's why we built it, and how it works.