The Polymathic Engineer

From Stateful to Stateless: Building Web Apps That Scale

A Practical Guide to Managing State and Building Scalable Web Applications.

Jan 9 • Franco Fernando

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December 2025

End of year wrap: 2025

A personal retrospective on the this year. Plus some thoughts about this newsletter and the most-read articles of the year.

Dec 27, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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Control Planes and Data Planes

A not-well-known pattern for designing better distributed systems.

Dec 20, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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Fundamental Graph Algorithms Part III: DFS On Directed Graphs

How depth-first search shines on directed graphs: topological sorting and strongly connected component algorithms

Dec 13, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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Fundamental Graph Algorithms - Part II: DFS

Depth First Search and its applications on undirected graphs: finding cycles and articulation vertices.

Dec 6, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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November 2025

Fundamental Graph Algorithms - Part I: BFS

Breadth First Search and its applications: shortest paths, connected components and bipartite testing.

Nov 29, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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How the Operating System Manages the Hardware

A Complete Guide to understand what happens when a program runs on your computer.

Nov 21, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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Scaling the data storage layer in system design

A quick journey through replication, partitioning, and NoSQL databases.

Nov 14, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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How to Estimate the Duration of a Task

Eight strategies you can use to give better estimations as a software engineer.

Nov 7, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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October 2025

Heap Use Cases Every Algorist Should Know

Three must to know practical applications of heap data structures: finding

Oct 31, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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Caching in Distributed Systems - Part III

Challenges of running caching in production environment: cache avalanche and penetration, traffic patterns, cold start, and consistency challenges.

Oct 24, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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Caching in Distributed Systems - Part II

An overview of more advanced cache concepts: read and write strategies, replacement policies, invalidation, and TTL.

Oct 17, 2025 • Franco Fernando

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