The Signal in the Noise When you first dive into system design, the sheer volume of concepts can be overwhelming. As one guide puts it, "the hardest part is not the concepts themselves. It is figuring out where to find clear explanations in one place." It's easy to get lost in a sea of buzzwords—sharding, CAP theorem, bulkheads, gRPC—without grasping the fundamental principles that connect them. This article cuts through that noise. Instead of a laundry list of fifty terms, w