Alex Xu (@alexxubyte)

My recommended materials for cracking your next technical interview: Coding - Leetcode - Cracking the coding interview book - Neetcode System Design Interview - System Design Interview book 1, 2 by Alex Xu - Grokking the system design by Design Guru - Design Data-intensive Application book Behavi...

Why is DeepSeek-OCR such a BIG DEAL? Existing LLMs struggle with long inputs because they can only handle a fixed number of tokens, known as the context window, and attention cost grows quickly as inputs get longer. DeepSeek-OCR takes a new approach. Instead of sending long context directly to an...

Which Protocols Run on TCP and UDP Every message sent over the internet has two layers of communication, one that carries the data (transport) and one that defines what the data means (application). TCP and UDP sit at the transport layer, but they serve completely different purposes. TCP is connec...

REST API vs. GraphQL When it comes to API design, REST and GraphQL each have their own strengths and weaknesses. REST - Uses standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE for CRUD operations. - Works well when you need simple, uniform interfaces between separate services/applications. - Cachin...

REST API Cheatsheet. The method to download high-resolution PDF is available at the end. This guide is designed to help you understand the world of RESTful APIs in a clear and engaging way. What's inside: - An exploration of the six fundamental principles of REST API design. - Insights into key ...

How can Cache Systems go wrong? The diagram below shows 4 typical cases where caches can go wrong and their solutions. 1. Thunder herd problem This happens when a large number of keys in the cache expire at the same time. Then the query requests directly hit the database, which overloads the datab...

Big Endian vs Little Endian Microprocessor architectures commonly use two different methods to store the individual bytes in memory. This difference is referred to as “byte ordering” or “endian nature”. 🔹 Little Endian Intel x86 processors store a two-byte integer with the least significant byte f...

Explaining 8 Popular Network Protocols in 1 Diagram. Network protocols are standard methods of transferring data between two computers in a network. 1. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) HTTP is a protocol for fetching resources such as HTML documents. It is the foundation of any data exchange on ...

Best ways to test system functionality Testing system functionality is a crucial step in software development and engineering processes. It ensures that a system or software application performs as expected, meets user requirements, and operates reliably. Here we delve into the best ways: 1. Uni...