Story Seven Ways to Talk
A field guide to API design from first principles. REST, SOAP, gRPC, GraphQL, Webhooks, WebSockets, and WebRTC, and the questions that pick them for you.
Presented by Hundreds United
The Trenches
Practical engineering insights from the frontlines. Deep dives into data architecture, infrastructure economics, and system design.
Latest Articles
View all Story 
Story Deep Modules GQL
GraphQL hands you a question REST answers for you by default: where does each rule live? A working theory of GraphQL APIs that hold up at scale.
Deep Modules GQL
Read Story →
Attention Residuals
Why every transformer ever built carries a structural flaw from 2015, and how the Kimi team fixed it by recognizing a pattern the field already solved once.
Attention Residuals
Read Brief →High-Level Design
A practical framework for writing HLDs that actually remove uncertainty. Six phases, a review process, and a full walkthrough from problem definition to rollout.
Game Changers in the Data Engineering Space
The full interactive story — fifteen tools reshaping how we ingest, transform, stream, orchestrate, and serve data. A standalone microsite experience.
pg_textsearch: BM25 Comes to Postgres in February
pg_textsearch brings BM25 ranking, 29+ languages, and blazing-fast full-text search to PostgreSQL. A deep dive into what this extension offers.
Topics
Data Architecture
Streaming vs batch processing, modern data stacks, and architectural patterns.
Infrastructure Economics
Cost analysis, vendor comparisons, and build-vs-buy decisions.
System Design
Practical patterns, operational complexity, and real-world trade-offs.
About
I'm Boyan Balev, a software engineer focused on data infrastructure and distributed systems. This blog shares practical insights from building and operating data platforms at scale.
Every article comes from real experience in the trenches - no ivory tower architectures, just patterns that work in production.