Curated List of Real-world Design Blog Posts

Real world examples where companies discuss trade-offs of certain technologies and how they design things to fit their use case. Contains a selection of posts that may be targeted to a platform, but concepts should be relevant to all

Here is a big list of company engineering blogs

Company Engineering Blogs

• Uber: Mobile Engineering
• Meta (Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp):
  • iOS Engineering
  • Android Engineering
• Square (Cash App): The Code
• Dropbox: Mobile
• Reddit: r/RedditEng
• Airbnb: Mobile
• Microsoft: Mobile Engineering

Backend

• Airbnb
  • How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo
• Instacart
  • Building Instacart’s view model API - Part 1: Why view model?
• Netflix
  • It’s All A/Bout Testing: The Netflix Experimentation Platform

API Design

• Slack
  • How We Design Our APIs at Slack
  • Evolving API Pagination at Slack
• Trello
  • A look at Trello: adopting GraphQL and Apollo in a legacy application

Build / Platform

• Airbnb
  • Designing for Productivity in a Large-Scale iOS Application
• Facebook
  • Rethinking Android app compilation with Buck
• Reddit
  • iOS and Bazel at Reddit: A Journey
• Uber
  • The Journey To Android Monorepo: The History Of Uber Engineering’s Android Codebase Organization
• Various
  • Monorepo Discussion

Caching / Offline

• Instagram
  • Building an Open Source, Carefree Android Disk Cache
• Trello
  • Airplane Mode: Enabling Trello Mobile Offline
  • Syncing Changes
  • Sync Failure Handling
  • The Two ID Problem
  • Offline Attachments
  • Sync is a Two-Way Street
  • Displaying Sync State

Emerging Markets

• Facebook
  • How we built Facebook Lite for every Android phone and network
• Microsoft
  • Microsoft Teams - Designing for Emerging Markets - Part 1 (Network Profile)
• Spotify
  • How We Built It: Spotify Lite, One Year Later
• Uber
  • Expanding Access: Engineering Uber Lite

Networking / Performance

• Dropbox
  • Making camera uploads for Android faster and more reliable
• Instagram
  • Improving performance with background data prefetching
  • Making Direct Messages Reliable and Fast
• Uber
  • How Uber’s New Driver App Overcomes Network Lag

Networking / Reliability

• SnapChat
  • QUIC at Snapchat
• Uber
  • Engineering Failover Handling in Uber’s Mobile Networking Infrastructure
  • Employing QUIC Protocol to Optimize Uber’s App Performance

Server-Driven UI

• AirBnB
  • A Deep Dive into Airbnb’s Server-Driven UI System
• DoorDash
  • Improving Development Velocity with Generic, Server-Driven UI Components
• Uber
  • Building the New Uber Freight App as Lists of Modular, Reusable Components
  • Architecting a Safe, Scalable, and Server-Driven Platform for Driver Preferences with RIBs
• Various - Strategies Discussion
  • Server-driven UI (or Backend driven UI) strategies

Cross-Platform

• Cash App
  • Cash App Case Study: Kotlin Multiplatform for Shared Business Logic
• Dropbox
  • The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

AI / Machine Learning

• Google
  • On-Device Machine Learning
• Meta
  • PyTorch Mobile

Architecture

• Martin Fowler