Discover How the World's Biggest
Software Platforms Are Built.Deep dives into the architecture, infrastructure, and engineering decisions behind products like ChatGPT, Netflix, WhatsApp, GitHub, Stripe, Vercel, and more.
Welcome to InsideTheStack, your premier destination to discover how the world's biggest software platforms are built. Understanding the architecture and system design of massively successful products is the key to leveling up as a software engineer.
Whether you are preparing for a system design interview, building scalable microservices, or simply curious about the infrastructure choices made by engineering teams at companies like Netflix, WhatsApp, Stripe, and Vercel, you will find comprehensive deep dives here. We break down complex engineering concepts into digestible, actionable insights.
Our mission is to demystify software architecture. We explore the tradeoffs behind different databases, the nuances of distributed systems, and the evolution of tech stacks over time. Dive into our latest articles below to explore how industry-leading platforms tackle unprecedented scale and reliability challenges every single day.
Recent Articles
How Telegram Actually Works
A deep dive into Telegram's architecture, the cloud-native design that syncs your chats across every device, the custom MTProto protocol built for hostile networks, and the radical team-size philosophy that keeps a billion-user platform running on a team you could fit in one conference room.
How WhatsApp Actually Works
A deep dive into WhatsApp's architecture, the decades-old telecom language behind its massive concurrency, the 'let it crash' philosophy that keeps it running through failures, and how a team of around 50 engineers served hundreds of millions of users.
How Figma Actually Works
A deep dive into Figma's architecture, the custom C++ rendering engine compiled to WebAssembly, the deliberately simple conflict-resolution system behind multiplayer editing, and the four-year journey from one Postgres database to a fully sharded fleet.
How n8n Actually Works
A deep dive into n8n's architecture, how the execution engine walks your workflow like a checklist, why a single slow node can block everything after it, and how queue mode turns a fragile single server into a system that survives 20,000 webhooks at once.