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This week’s system design refresher:
LAST CALL FOR ENROLLMENT: Become an AI Engineer - Cohort 5
12 Claude Code Features Every Engineer Should Know (Youtube video)
Load Balancer vs API Gateway
What is MCP?
REST vs gRPC
Session-Based vs JWT-Based Authentication
A Cheat Sheet on The Most-Used Linux Commands
LAST CALL FOR ENROLLMENT: Become an AI Engineer - Cohort 5
Our 5th cohort of Becoming an AI Engineer starts today, March 28. This is a live, cohort-based course created in collaboration with best-selling author Ali Aminian and published by ByteByteGo.
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Here’s what makes this cohort special:
Learn by doing: Build real world AI applications, not just by watching videos.
Structured, systematic learning path: Follow a carefully designed curriculum that takes you step by step, from fundamentals to advanced topics.
Live feedback and mentorship: Get direct feedback from instructors and peers.
Community driven: Learning alone is hard. Learning with a community is easy!
We are focused on skill building, not just theory or passive learning. Our goal is for every participant to walk away with a strong foundation for building AI systems.
If you want to start learning AI from scratch, this is the perfect platform for you to begin.
12 Claude Code Features Every Engineer Should Know
Load Balancer vs API Gateway
Load balancers and API gateways both sit between your clients and backend servers. But they do very different things, and mixing them up causes real problems in your architecture.
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A load balancer has one job: distribute traffic. Clients send HTTP(s) requests from web, mobile, or IoT apps, and the load balancer spreads those requests across multiple server instances so no single server takes all the load.
It handles:
Traffic distribution
Health checks to detect downed servers
Failover when something breaks
L4/L7 balancing depending on whether you're routing by IP or by actual HTTP content.
An API gateway does a lot more than that. It also receives HTTP(s) requests from the same types of clients, but instead of just forwarding traffic, it controls what gets through and how.
Rate limiting to prevent abuse.
API aggregation so your client doesn't need to call five different services.
Observability for logging and monitoring.
Authentication and authorization before a request even touches your backend.
Request and response transformation to reshape payloads between client and service formats.
In most production setups, the load balancer and api gateway sit together. The API gateway handles the smart stuff up front, rate limits, auth, routing to the right microservice. Then the load balancer behind it distributes traffic across instances of that service.
They're not competing tools. They work best when used together.
What is MCP?
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new system introduced by Anthropic to make AI models more powerful.