codespy.org

Backend engineering & system design,
without the fluff.

No recycled docs, no paraphrased Wikipedia. Every article is written by someone who has actually built the thing — with real diagrams, real trade-offs, and real code.

codespy latest --limit 3

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Jul 8 — How to Design a URL Shortener Like TinyURL…

Jun 27 — Payment Processing Systems: A Complete Architect’s Guide

Nov 23 — Demystifying What is an IP Addresses: Your Essential…

3 articles found_

Topics we write about

What we cover

Three areas. Covered properly.

System Design

8 articles

Architecture breakdowns of real systems — payment processing, distributed databases, rate limiters — explained end to end.

Browse articles

Projects

4 articles

Full build logs for real applications, from first commit to production, with the decisions and trade-offs included.

Browse articles

Spring AI

5 articles

Practical Spring Boot + AI engineering — LLM integration, RAG pipelines, and agents, for working Java developers.

Browse articles
How we work

The principles behind every article

1

Practitioner-first

Every article is written by someone who has actually built the thing. No recycled docs, no paraphrased Wikipedia.

2

Simple language, real examples

If a junior developer can't follow it, the article isn't ready. No jargon for its own sake.

3

Depth over shallow overviews

We don't do 300-word overviews. If a topic is worth covering, we cover it properly — diagrams, examples, code.

Fresh off the compiler

Latest articles

System Design July 8, 2026 10 min read

How to Design a URL Shortener Like TinyURL — Step-by-Step for System Design Interviews

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine — three years into his backend career, preparing hard for an SDE role at a company most of us would kill to…

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Who's behind this

Built by people who've shipped the thing they write about

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