SysDsgn

As hinted earlier, our next book club series kicks off this Sunday (Jan 11) with Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA). See you there 🚀 : discord.gg/hNdUgEKgQD

We have lots of plans for the @sysdsgn community and we're looking for a community manager to lead the efforts. Apply if that sounds interesting to you: forms.gle/CUfBsmh8Wi4rKA…. PS: It's a volunteer role.

This brings the throwback series of our DB Internals book club to an end! We hope the sessions help you as you go through the book. 🚨Coming up next in our book club: Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. More details coming soon!

Ch. 14: Consensus is now up on YouTube! In this last session of the series, @TiemmaBakare leads us in discussing consensus algorithms and how they enable agreement in distributed systems. 🎥 Watch on YouTube → youtu.be/QoZdYDt5F9I

Ch. 13: Distributed Transactions is now up on YouTube! In this session, Chidinma breaks down distributed transactions and how they help preserve ACID across multiple databases. We cover two and three phase-commits, then look at partitioning and sharding for scalability. The session wraps up with a review of real-world systems like Calvin and Google Spanner and how they handle coordination, consistency, and timing challenges. 🎥 Watch on YouTube → youtube.com/watch?v=II1y1H…

Ch. 12: Anti-Entropy and Dissemination is now up on YouTube! In this session, @HeyAmaka takes us through Chapter 12 of @therealdatabass, exploring anti-entropy and data dissemination in distributed systems. We discuss how mechanisms like read repair, hinted handoff, and digest reads help reconcile inconsistencies between replicas. 🎥 Watch on YouTube → youtube.com/watch?v=tgNRaQ…

@Wandexdev @OlahFemi Here you go: discord.gg/JZKd4UrWcP

@sysdsgn @OlahFemi This invite is expired @sysdsgn . Can you share an updated one?

Last year, the Sysdsgn community ran a book club where we went through Database Internals chapter by chapter on Discord📚 We recently found the recordings, and they’re too good not to share😅 Over the next few weeks, we’ll upload them to YouTube and post updates here. Stay tuned!

@_alternatewolf @haile_lagi Ch. 11: Replication and Consistency x.com/sysdsgn/status…

@_alternatewolf @haile_lagi Ch. 10: Leader Election x.com/sysdsgn/status…

Ch. 11: Replication and Consistency is up here and on YouTube! In this session, @damilolaajiboye covers Chapter 11 of @therealdatabass. He goes into replication, consistency, CAP theorem trade-offs, quorum systems, and tools like CDRTs and Raft for building reliable distributed systems. 🎥 Watch on YouTube → youtu.be/4B0Z-i9R3bw

Ch. 10: Leader Election is now up on YouTube! In this session, @pascalobba explores Chapter 10 of @therealdatabass, discussing leader election in distributed systems; what it is, why it matters, and how it helps in coordinating nodes. We also review Kubernetes' leader election algorithm and the key properties that make for a reliable implementation. 🎥 Watch on YouTube → youtu.be/JoXZOpcAr0g

Ch. 9: Failure Detection is now live now available to watch! In this session, @chidiwilliams__ takes us through Chapter 9 of @therealdatabass. We discuss how distributed systems detect failure and reach consensus when nodes go dark. We review concepts like heartbeats and pings, gossip between neighbours, and how systems move from binary detection to probabilistic, history-aware failure accrual. 🎥Watch on YouTube → youtu.be/ucgas9rMgxM

We're excited to announce a different type of talk—a panel discussion—for SysConf 2025! We're calling it "The Technical Leadership Panel". In it, we host 4 engineering leaders with years of tangible experience to discuss their careers, how they've grown, how they help their teams succeed, what excellence means to them and more. The panel consists of * Ojimaojo Udale-Ameh (@uncooloj): Product & Engineering Leader * Oluwatobi Ajia (@ElTobeski): Engineering Manager @moniepoint * Ifeoluwa Sobogun (@IfeSobog): Technical Lead @paystack * John Ojetunde (@johnoojetunde): Head of Engineering @moniepoint This panel will be hosted by @_alternatewolf.

We’re excited to announce Ayomide Oyekanmi @_alternatewolf as a speaker at SysConf 2025! His talk is titled “The SysDsgn Ethos”. This is a talk that goes to the roots of why @sysdsgn was created by Ayo, Chidi (@chidiwilliams__) & Bayo (@mazibayo), the goals they are trying to achieve, and how programs like @sysconf_ & @sdsaprogram move the needle towards those goals. One of such goals is to elevate engineering excellence in our ecosystem and beyond. The talk will explore excellence means and how engineers can embody it, leaving attendees with both an ideal to aspire to and practical steps to get there.

We’re excited to announce Paul Oamen @po_oamen as a speaker at SysConf 2025! His talk is titled “Trustless Federated Learning at Edge Scale". Today’s leading AI labs train their models in centralized data centers. Paul believes that tomorrow’s models will be trained on billions of independent edge devices. He’s spent time researching this topic and has written a paper (in-review) which will be the basis of this talk at SysConf. In this this talk he presents a proposed trustless federated learning architecture that uses the blockchain, cryptographic receipts and geometric novelty to enable large-scale, verifiable and incentive-aligned AI training across untrusted edge devices.

We’re excited to announce Justin Irabor as a speaker at SysConf 2025! His talk is titled “How to Develop Intuition About AI Agents, or Introduction to Graph Theory". Most developers encounter AI agents as black boxes wrapped in framework abstractions. After debugging enough agent loops, timeout spirals, and inexplicable tool-calling failures, a pattern emerged: agents are just graphs. You import a framework, chain some prompts together, maybe add a vector database, and hope it works. But when it breaks—and it will—you're left guessing. In this talk, Justin reframes AI agents through the lens of graph theory, giving you a mental model that makes agent behavior predictable and debuggable.

We’re excited to announce Temi Babs @iamtemibabs as a speaker at SysConf 2025! His talk is titled “Building Africa’s Voice Stack". In this talk, Temi dives into the architecture, tooling, and developer ecosystem behind Africa’s growing voice-AI infrastructure. He will discuss how to build and scale speech-to-text, translation, and text-to-speech systems for under-represented languages; including data collection, model design, latency optimization, and API usability. Attendees will learn how developer platforms like Spitch (@spitch_app) are enabling a new wave of applications—from call centre automation to content dubbing—all powered by African languages. The goal is to raise the bar for local AI systems that are as fast, reliable, and developer-friendly as global equivalents.