4 posts tagged with "Architecture & System Design"

Last year, while scaling an API service, I found myself reaching for Redis and EC2 auto-scaling groups far too early. It seemed like the “right” thing to do—after all, it was what I’d seen in tutorials, open-source projects, and most blogs. As a junior developer, I thought that using “production-grade” solutions like these was the most logical path.

At the time, it felt like progress. I was learning AWS, configuring auto-scaling groups, and managing Redis instances. But what I didn’t realize was that all of this came with significant overhead—both in terms of time and complexity.

When designing software interfaces—especially APIs—it's tempting to favor flexibility and abstraction. But there are domains where performance, predictability, and simplicity demand a different mindset.

This is what design is about: the Tradeoffs.

Let's take Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as an example:

1114 contributions to Tornado.Cash Trusted Setup, 141,416 contributions to Ethereum's KZG ceremony! But what are these ceremonies about? Why do they matter?

A few years ago, we were scaling a crypto exchange, onboarding thousands of new users weekly. Every deposit needed a unique address, and our infrastructure was drowning in key management complexity.

We had two choices: