Eric Wilson

Designing a URL shortener is often dismissed as a "junior-level" exercise. But it remains a staple of the system design interview for one specific reason: it forces you to justify every single byte and millisecond of latency. It’s not just a coding challenge; it’s a high-stakes data management problem. At global scale, the "obvious" solutions quickly crumble under the weight of their own trade-offs. This series or articles on system design deep dives, focus not on the "how," but on the "why." In this article, we deconstruct:  • Why distributed counters are almost always superior to standard hashing.   • The real reason major shorteners choose less-efficient 302 redirects over 301s (it’s about product, not tech).   • The mathematical logic behind Base62 encoding.   • Caching strategies to protect your database from "viral tweet" traffic. If you are preparing for system design interviews or managing high-concurrency systems, check out the full breakdown below.

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Anyone who uses Claude Code is now an engineering manager. And as Jocko Willink explains: “Every problem is a leadership problem.” Those of us who now manage the new “managers of agents” have additional responsibilities to ensure that effective guidelines, procedures, tools, and training are in place. Our race to push through 10x delivery records can be a “sugar high” with a painful hangover.

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Claude Code now has built-in LSP support. This will produce more consistent code changes, allowing for Spec Coding of larger projects. It is an important upgrade! Read about what that means here: https://lnkd.in/eThKmKAd

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Your LLM is burning 75% extra tokens and your budget with it. JSON was built for APIs. TOON was built for reasoning. VSC was built for raw efficiency. That difference matters. Especially when tokens drive cost, latency and throughput. Here is the reality no team can ignore. 412 chars in JSON. 154 chars in TOON. A 63% reduction on day one. Then VSC arrived and cut again. Teams are reporting 75% fewer tokens vs JSON. 59% fewer tokens vs TOON. The savings are not subtle. They reshape your economics. TOON became the middle layer for structured prompts. Cleaner syntax. Columnar layout. Often 30% to 60% savings in real workloads. Think of it as CSV-style rows for reasoning. Predictable. Efficient. LLM native. VSC strips even that bare. Just values. Comma separated. No keys. No metadata. A format built for machines that think in tokens. Here is the difference in one glance. 𝗝𝗦𝗢𝗡 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗮𝘁 {  "user_id": 10291,  "name": "Ava",  "email": "ava@example.com",  "role": "buyer",  "tier": "gold",  "purchases": 14,  "lifetime_value": 1294.50,  "active": true } 𝗩𝗦𝗖 𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 10291,Ava,ava@example.com,buyer,gold,14,1294.50,true That is why the savings went nuclear. 75% vs JSON. 59% vs TOON. Raw compression with no excess syntax. My Takeaway: We spent years optimizing models. Now it is time to optimize the data we feed them. If you are defining your AI strategy, let us talk. I help teams turn AI systems into reliable business outcomes. Save 💾 React 👍 Share ♻️ Follow

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