SeeTheStack is a small, opinionated library of visual deep-dives for the architectures that quietly run the internet — payments, ride-hailing, RAG pipelines, vector databases, the storage engine inside Cosmos DB. The goal is simple: stop guessing, see how the system actually works, then go deeper when you need to.
Software engineer at Microsoft, working on distributed systems and the data layer behind products used at global scale.
I make these because they're the resource I wish existed when I was ramping up. Most system-design content is either a 30-minute YouTube monologue or a 200-page book — there's not much in the middle that respects your time and still goes deep. So I built it.
Most engineering writing leads with prose. We lead with motion. A 60-second animation gets a system into your head before the first paragraph — then the words make sense, instead of the other way around.
A simulator with knobs you can break beats a wall of bullet points. We build interactive React islands for the concepts that benefit most — rate limiters, CAP triangles, hash rings, KV caches — because intuition compounds.
Every concept is a layered cake: animation, deep-dive article, interactive viz, simulator, long-form video, code challenge. Pick the format that fits your depth, your time, and your mood.
The best way to understand what this place is — open one and watch it for 60 seconds.