The Accidental CTO
A practical, real-world handbook on system design and scaling infrastructure from zero to millions of users.
Book Overview
• Author: Subhash Choudhary (Co-founder & CTO of Dukaan)
• The Story: A candid account of scaling Dukaan's infrastructure to over a million online stores—built entirely without a formal computer science degree.
• Style: Story-driven, practical, and packed with real 3:00 AM production crisis moments instead of dry academic theory.
• Access: Open-source and completely free to read online.
Core Topics Covered
Distributed Systems & Scaling
• Moving from single-machine setups to multi-region architectures.
• Handling massive request volumes and high-concurrency traffic surges.
Architecture Trade-offs
• Implementing database replication, sharding, and read-write splitting.
• Designing smart caching strategies and asynchronous task queues.
Resilience & Observability
• Setting up actionable metrics, logs, traces, SLAs, and SLOs.
• Building circuit breakers and graceful degradation systems to prevent total outages.
Cost & Infrastructure Efficiency
• Making engineering choices based on strict cost-to-performance metrics.
• Navigating the realities of cloud-to-bare-metal infrastructure migrations.
