Design a Leaderboard / Counter System at Scale — 2026 Patterns
Leaderboards and live counters at scale. Redis sorted sets, counter sharding for hot keys, eventual consistency tradeoffs, and the production realities.
Redis
Caching Strategies in 2026 — Redis, Valkey, and the Patterns That Actually Work
Production caching strategies — cache-aside vs write-through vs write-behind, stampede prevention, hot keys, TTL design, the Redis-vs-Valkey split, and a checklist for adding caching that doesn’t bite back.
Design a Rate Limiter — Algorithms, Distributed Implementation, and the Tradeoffs
How to design a distributed rate limiter end-to-end. The four classic algorithms, when to pick each, a Redis Lua implementation, distributed coordination, and the gotchas (clock skew, hot keys, fairness).
Rate Limiting Strategies for APIs
A practical comparison of rate limiting algorithms (fixed window, sliding window, leaky bucket, token bucket), production-ready Redis implementations, and the headers your API should return.
Redis Caching Strategies for Backend Developers
How to use Redis as a cache properly — patterns (cache-aside, read-through, write-behind), key design, TTLs, invalidation, and the production gotchas to avoid.
Celery and Background Tasks for Python Backends
A practical Celery guide: brokers, workers, idempotent task design, retries with backoff, scheduled jobs, and the production setup that actually scales.