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System Design Survival Guide: The Dream of "Boring" vs Ugly Reality 🚀

Mixing Sean Goedecke’s take with the full-contact roast the Hacker News wizards gave it (957 points, 390 comments), you start to see that being a software engineer means trying to please everyone at once. Here’s a savage-but-affectionate recap of the internet’s opinions on system design — full credit to Sean for the original ideas, the roasting is all Hacker News, and the part at the end where I get petty is entirely my own doing.

Monday, August 17, 2026 Read
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HTTP 429 When Calling the Gemini API on AWS

Running into HTTP 429 calling the Gemini API on AWS — and how our team fixed it. 429 is Google’s polite way of saying “slow down.” While building our capstone project (a RAG chatbot running on EC2 that calls the Gemini API), we hit an error that anyone who’s integrated a third-party API has probably run into at least once: HTTP 429 – Too Many Requests. At first we were pretty confused, because everything ran fine locally — no signs of trouble at all. But the moment we deployed to EC2 and tested with multiple concurrent users, requests piled up and Gemini politely declined with a 429.

Sunday, August 2, 2026 Read