ANDROID APP
Neko
An anime tracker for Android, built on AniList. Ad-free.
5K+ downloads · Google Play · observed 26 October 2026
ENGINEER · CREATOR
Few Shot Studio
Learn how the apps you use every day are built: animated Hinglish stories of system design, by a software engineer.
Browse the cheat sheets, projects and reels here at your own pace.
FREE TO READ
Free cheat sheets
- Read it
Design IRCTC Tatkal
One seat, never sold to two people
- Coming soon
Design Uber
Match a rider to a driver in seconds
- Coming soon
Design a Notification System
OTPs and alerts that must arrive
THINGS I'VE BUILT
Projects
CHROME EXTENSION
SyncCouch
Watch together from two homes. A Chrome extension for couples.
v0.2.0 · 216 users · Chrome Web Store · observed 26 October 2026
THE PERSON AT THE DESK
Shashank
Software engineer. Why did your OTP come three minutes late? How did Maps know about the jam? I answer questions like these the way a system design interview wants.
- SCRIPTS
- I write every script myself.
- WORLDS
- My helper robot helps me build the small world inside each reel.
- PROJECTS
- Two apps I've built: Neko and SyncCouch.
ONE SHORT EPISODE AT A TIME
Reels
- Lakhon ki rank. Turant kaise badle? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
Your answer locked in four seconds on KBC Play Along, yet your rank stayed at 2,62,000: a Redis sorted set, a skip list and its spans, ties, and a composite score that breaks them.
- 8 minute mein doodh. Itni jaldi kaise? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
Milk ordered at seven in the morning, at the door in eight minutes, and the secret is distance, not the rider's speed: a dark store, a geofence, a spatial index, point-in-polygon, sharding by store, a planogram and safety stock.
- No Service. Phir bhi blue dot kaise chal raha hai? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
One signal's trip from a satellite to a hiker's phone with no network: atomic clocks, a one-way broadcast, time turned into distance, and trilateration.
- Instagram ko kaise pata? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
After a fight you open Reels and a “sorry” reel is waiting, though you liked and searched nothing: embeddings, candidate retrieval, ranking, and how the reels you stop on teach it what to show you next.
- This light is the photo you just sent. on Instagram (opens a new tab)
Your Diwali photo for bhai in London, slowed a hundred times on its way across the sea floor. From the Isse Kehte Hain series.
- Loan ka SMS turant aa gaya, par OTP teen minute late. Kyun? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
Your card OTP stuck behind a lakh loan offers in one line, and the design that sends it first: priority queues, a validity period, delivery receipts, failover and backoff.
- App usko bhejta kyun nahi? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
Why the car two minutes away isn't sent to you: batch matching, an offer with a timeout, and aging so no rider waits forever.
- Maps ko jam ka pata kaise chala? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
How Maps knew about the jam before you did: phones on the road, a road graph, a prediction, and the 99 phones in Berlin.
- Payment bank pe ho gaya, par system crash ho gaya. Ab? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
One UPI payment whose answer is “abhi pata nahi”: a webhook and a status check, an outbox, reconciliation and a state machine.
- Attention mein Query, Key, Value samjhao. on Instagram (opens a new tab)
Self-attention on one leave mail and “isko chhota karo”: Query, Key, Value and softmax, and why a long chat costs so much.
- Chat like WhatsApp. Friend on another server? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
A message to a friend on another server, a college group of 400, and a retry: a directory, fan-out, catch-up and idempotency.
- Tatkal at 10:00. Lock the seat? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
One 3A seat from New Delhi to Patna: read replicas, a lock, a timed hold, and a bitmask for the legs of the trip.
- Crores live at once. Autoscaling? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
The IPL final streamed to crores of phones at the same moment, and what has to grow to carry it.
- Food app: which database? on Instagram (opens a new tab)
Orders and money in Postgres, then a cache, search and live location, each doing its own job.