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You've probably seen gRPC described as "REST but faster." That framing is technically true and practically useless.

"Our database is highly available" means four different things, and they protect against four different failures. A ladder for forcing that conversation to be specific — plus why the money most teams spend on availability goes to the failure modes they face least.

Picture this: a live dashboard that polls for new notifications every 3 seconds. The count increments in state, the UI updates, everything looks right — except the interval callback is silently reading count = 0 on every tick, because it.

Kafka is a distributed commit log, not a message queue. Segments on disk, the ISR, the KRaft controller quorum and zero-copy fetches — and how each one explains a config option you've had to set.

Your Node.js server calls res.send("hello") and somewhere, 1400 bytes cross the planet in 80 milliseconds and appear correctly in a browser. That's wild. But what actually happens?

A client-side router watches the URL, matches it against patterns, and calls a handler. Build one in 110 lines — params, wildcards, back/forward — and see the four decisions every router makes for you.