Beyond Coding How to Think About System Design (GitHub Engineer's Perspective)
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Nov 19, 2025 Bassem Dghaidi, a senior software engineer at GitHub with extensive experience in large-scale services, shares his insights on practical system design. He discusses the importance of simplicity over complexity, warning against premature scaling. Bassem emphasizes vertical scaling as a strategy for startups and explains how GitHub efficiently handles massive traffic with minimal architecture. He also touches on translating technical challenges into business risks and the growing influence of AI agents in coding, speeding up processes considerably.
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Kubernetes Migration Almost Sank A Startup
- A startup migration to Kubernetes nearly sank the company due to non-technical pressures and costs.
- Bassem used that story to show teams chase fancy architectures for status, not necessity.
Millions Served By Simple Architecture
- You can handle millions of requests with surprisingly simple architecture if you design carefully.
- Vertical scaling and modest clusters often beat premature distributed complexity.
Design For Today, Not The Far Future
- Start simple and avoid designing for far-future scale; use one or two VMs for early users.
- Only redesign when you reach resource limits and have data-driven projections.