10 The “How We Built It” pattern

This chapter covers

  • Blog posts that share your most impressive engineering achievements
  • Their purpose and audience
  • How various authors approached this type of post
  • Key elements of successful “How We Built It” posts
  • Dos and don’ts for your own “How We Built It” post

Engineers are natural builders, a curious and constantly tinkering bunch. When we’re not scratching that itch by building something ourselves, it’s always fun to see what others are building—for pragmatic learning, inspiration, and really just pure discovery.

First and foremost, engineers writing about how they built things creates a valuable knowledge base for the community, brick by brick (pun intended). Such blog posts might be triggered by a range of experiments and achievements:

  • Using a rising technology as one of the early adopters. For example,
    • A new database specialized for a niche (e.g., adopting the TigerBeetle database for your brand-new banking system)
    • A new framework for creating web pages (e.g., Rust’s Leptos)
    • A new programming language (e.g., writing your software in Zig)
  • Successfully using the same technology (e.g., Postgres) for decades
  • Using a novel system architecture (e.g., one trying to serve billions of users)
  • Improving an existing architecture to cut cloud costs by millions of dollars per year
  • Implementing an algorithm previously known only from academic papers
  • Inventing a new algorithm (or improving an existing one) and implementing it

10.1 Purpose

10.1.1 Pioneering

10.1.2 Flexing muscles

10.1.3 Free peer review

10.2 Audience

10.3 Examples of “How We Built It” blog posts

10.3.1 How Prime Video Updates its App for More Than 8,000 Device Types

10.3.2 Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm

10.3.3 How We Built Notification Rate Limiter for Eight Billion Notifications Per Day for 400 Million Monthly Active Users

10.3.4 How We Built Scalable Spatial Data and Spatial Indexing in CockroachDB

10.3.5 Ship Shape

10.4 Characteristics