Infrastructure / Platform / System Design Daily Digests

Daily learning project for novice-friendly infrastructure, platform engineering, distributed systems, and system design concepts.

The Hermes cron job sends one email digest per day to nick@nickbytes.com and records each sent digest locally as Markdown.

Focus areas

Primary orientation: keep the course beginner-friendly while also making it useful for Nick as a manager and technical leader at Coinbase working inside established systems. Do not over-correct into only engineering-leadership advice. Each lesson should first teach the underlying infrastructure/platform concept clearly from first principles, then add a practical lens for understanding existing architectures, incident reports, reliability risks, operational tradeoffs, and cross-team technical decisions.

• Prediction markets, trading systems, financial exchanges, and market data infrastructure
• Coinbase-adjacent platform concepts: reliability, scale, ledgers, matching/settlement, risk systems, observability
• Real Coinbase incidents as concrete examples when useful, especially the short opening series on the 2026-05-07 outage case study
• Technical leadership in established systems: what questions to ask, what risks to look for, how to evaluate runbooks, how to prioritize follow-ups
• Social apps and apps at scale: feeds, graphs, notifications, ranking, abuse prevention, media, realtime systems
• Kubernetes as one sequenced learning path, starting from zero
• Observability/Datadog/monitoring as one sequenced learning path, starting from zero
• Kafka/streams/queues/event-driven systems as one sequenced learning path, starting from zero
• Redis/caching/fast data access as one sequenced learning path, starting from zero
• Classic system design topics from large-company engineering blogs and popular system design books
• Concepts explained for a novice, with concrete examples and practical takeaways

Files

• tracks/learning-track.md — ordered curriculum; daily entries should build on previous entries and preview the next one
• case-studies/ — real incidents and architecture examples to weave into lessons
• digests/ — one Markdown file per sent lesson, named YYYY-MM-DD-topic-slug.md
• public/ — generated local static site; open public/index.html in a browser
• scripts/build_site.py — dependency-free static site builder
• sent-index.md — chronological ledger of sent topics and source links
• topic-backlog.md — suggested topic pool; the cron job may add to or draw from this

Cron job behavior

Each run should:

1. Read sent-index.md, tracks/learning-track.md, relevant case-studies/.md, and existing digests/.md to avoid repeating topics.
2. Follow the learning-track order. Start with Track A, the short Coinbase outage concept series, before the general topic tracks. After Track A, move on; do not make every future email about this one incident.
3. Pick the next useful concept relevant to the focus areas and current learning sequence.
4. Keep lessons beginner-first, then add practical Coinbase technical-leader relevance.
5. Use reputable sources where possible: large-company engineering blogs, architecture writeups, classic papers, official docs, or system design books.
6. Weave in local case studies only when they genuinely clarify the topic. The Coinbase 2026-05-07 incident is especially useful for Kubernetes draining, Kafka partition recovery, observability/Sev1 response, matching-engine quorum, market reopening, failure isolation, and disaster recovery tradeoffs, but it should not dominate unrelated lessons.
7. Write a novice-friendly Markdown lesson locally before sending.
8. Send the lesson body by email to nick@nickbytes.com using local mail tooling, but verify local mail queue status after sending. On 2026-05-09, /usr/bin/mail exited 0 while Postfix still held the message in the queue, so exit code 0 alone is not proof of delivery.
9. Append a short entry to sent-index.md only after the email command succeeds and mailq/sendmail -bp no longer shows the message queued for nick@nickbytes.com.
10. Rebuild the local site with python3 scripts/build_site.py, then Nick can open public/index.html in a browser.

Cloudflare Pages delivery option

Local mail delivery has proven unreliable on macOS/Postfix. Cloudflare Pages setup notes live in CLOUDFLARE_SETUP.md. A Pages project named infra-platform-system-design-digests exists in the Nickbytes Cloudflare account, and npm run deploy:pages can deploy the generated public/ directory. Do not switch the scheduled cron to automatic Cloudflare publishing until the target URL is protected by Cloudflare Access or another explicit privacy decision is made.