All 34 articles, sorted alphabetically
ARC architecture
Deep-dive on ARC, the Adaptive Replacement Cache that beats LRU and LFU by adapting the recency-versus-frequency balance automatically per workload, w…
Read article →Big-O Notation
How Big-O notation describes worst-case time and space complexity, why constants and lower-order terms drop, and how to reason about scalability.
Read article →Bloom filter architecture
Deep-dive on Bloom filter architecture: hash family, sizing math, counting and cuckoo variants, and the ops layer for production use.
Read article →Count-Min Sketch Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of Count-Min Sketch: d × w counter matrix, hash functions, insert + query, overestimate math, parameters, applications, varian…
Read article →Consistent hashing architecture
Deep-dive on consistent hashing: ring, virtual nodes, replica walk, bounded loads, Anchor/Jump/Rendezvous variants, and cluster management.
Read article →Cuckoo Filter
Cuckoo filter: modern Bloom alternative.
Read article →DiskANN architecture
Deep-dive on DiskANN: the Vamana low-diameter graph, product-quantized guidance in RAM with full vectors on disk, beam search and exact re-rank, alpha…
Read article →Distributed Consensus Architecture: Raft, Paxos, and Beyond
A 2500-word walkthrough of a modern consensus system: client, coordinator, leader, log, followers, state machines, and snapshots.
Read article →Fenwick Tree (BIT)
How Fenwick trees (Binary Indexed Trees) enable O(log n) point updates and prefix sum queries with less overhead than segment trees.
Read article →Hash Tables
How hash tables provide O(1) average lookup, collision resolution strategies (chaining, open addressing), and load factor tuning.
Read article →Heap Operations
How binary heaps implement priority queues in O(log n), the heapify trick, and applications from Dijkstra to scheduling.
Read article →HyperLogLog Algorithm Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of HyperLogLog: hash function, bucketing, rank via leading zeros, harmonic mean estimator, bias correction, merge, space-error…
Read article →HNSW architecture
Deep-dive on HNSW: layered proximity graphs, greedy descent and efSearch beam search, geometric level assignment, the diversity neighbor heuristic, fi…
Read article →IVF-PQ vector index architecture
Deep-dive on the IVF-PQ approximate nearest-neighbor index: coarse quantization and inverted lists (nlist/nprobe), product quantization into per-subsp…
Read article →KMP Algorithm
How the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm finds a pattern in text in O(n+m) by precomputing a failure function.
Read article →LRU cache architecture
Deep-dive on LRU cache: hash map + linked list, admission policies (TinyLFU), concurrency, TTL, weighted entries, variants.
Read article →LSM Tree Compaction Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of LSM compaction: memtable → SSTables, STCS/LCS/TWCS strategies, triggers, throttling, and read/write/space amplification.
Read article →LSM trees vs B-trees
Deep-dive on LSM trees vs B-trees: in-place read-optimized B-trees vs append-merge write-optimized LSM trees, write/read/space amplification, compacti…
Read article →Mergesort
How mergesort divides, sorts, and merges. Why it's stable, why it's the choice for linked lists, and how it …
Read article →Merkle trees -- efficient verification of large data
Deep-dive on Merkle trees: hashing data blocks into leaves and up to a single root, tamper evidence (any change alters the root), O(1) root comparison…
Read article →Quicksort
How quicksort partitions around a pivot and recursively sorts, why it's O(n log n) average, and how to avoid O(n²) worst case.
Read article →Quotient Filter
Quotient filter: cache-friendly approximate set.
Read article →Reservoir Sampling
Reservoir sampling for streaming uniform samples.
Read article →Ribbon filter architecture
Deep-dive on the ribbon filter: a static approximate-membership structure that encodes the key set as a solved banded linear system over GF(2), reachi…
Read article →Roaring bitmaps -- compressed bitmaps that stay fast
Deep-dive on roaring bitmaps: the bitmap dilemma (fast but big, or small but slow), chunking the integer space by the high 16 bits, the three adaptive…
Read article →Segment Tree
How segment trees enable range sum, min, max queries in O(log n), and how lazy propagation supports range updates.
Read article →Skip list architecture
Deep-dive on skip lists: levels, level selection, search, insert/delete, concurrent variants, range iterators, memory, use cases.
Read article →Space-Saving architecture
Deep-dive on the Space-Saving algorithm for approximate top-k heavy hitters: a fixed table of k counters, the increment-or-evict-the-minimum rule that…
Read article →t-digest architecture
Deep-dive on the t-digest quantile sketch: (mean, count) centroids, the scale function that warps cluster sizes to keep the tails sharp, the compressi…
Read article →Top-K / heavy hitters -- finding the most frequent in a stream
Deep-dive on top-K / heavy-hitter algorithms: the most-frequent-items problem, why exact counting is memory-prohibitive, Space-Saving (bounded counter…
Read article →Longest Palindromic Subsequence
Longest subsequence (not contiguous) that's a palindrome. O(N²) DP.
Read article →Planarity Testing
Determine if graph can be drawn without edge crossings. O(V+E).
Read article →Traveling Salesman Problem
Bitmask DP: O(2^N × N²) beats brute-force O(N!).
Read article →Word Search
Find word in 2D grid by adjacency. Classic DFS + backtracking.
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