System design, dissected

Real systems, taken apart down to the one bottleneck that defines them.

behindscale dissects top engineering blog posts into structured summaries and interactive artifacts you can break. Every article names its crux — the bottleneck that made the problem hard — and groups with every other system that hit the same wall.

Live artifact · Priority-blind load shedding

Drag TRAFFIC past capacity, then flip SHED SMART — watch payments hold while batch jobs get shed first.

Dissected from first-party blogs

  • Airbnb
  • Amazon (AWS)
  • Discord
  • Figma
  • GitHub
  • Meta
  • Netflix
  • Notion
  • Shopify
  • Slack
  • Stripe
  • Uber
What's inside

Bottlenecks that show up more than once.

Browse all 14 breakdowns →