How They Scaled

About How They Scaled

How They Scaled is a searchable archive of engineering case studies in which real companies explain how they grew their systems. It is aimed at backend and infrastructure engineers, architects and engineering leaders who want practical lessons from production systems rather than theory. Visitors can filter the 63 write-ups from 23 companies by stack, technique, company and whether a post includes scale numbers.

Each entry is summarized with the companies, technologies and scaling techniques involved, such as sharding, caching, online migrations and load shedding. Topics range from database migrations and GPU training clusters to real-time protocols and edge computing. The site also offers a weekly newsletter of new write-ups.

What sets it apart is the focus on how the work was actually done, organized by the problem a reader is trying to solve. Instead of browsing a general tech blog feed, readers can jump straight to, for example, PostgreSQL connection pooling or horizontal sharding examples from named companies.