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Every C programmer calls malloc, but few know what happens after the call disappears into the standard library. The allocator is managing a heap of raw memory, carving it into chunks, tracking what's free, and trying to do all of that fast enough that you never notice the overhead. Here's how it actually works.
Discord serves hundreds of millions of registered users, handles trillions of stored messages, and routes voice traffic through over 850 servers across 30+ data centers. None of that runs on a single clever trick. It runs on a stack that has been replaced, migrated, and rewritten in pieces as each layer hit its ceiling.
Netflix streams to over 300 million subscribers across 190 countries, serves petabytes of video daily, and runs one of the most sophisticated engineering organizations in the world. Here is how they built it. Also, they rejected me. Three times. But we will get to that.