He emphasizes that there is no "perfect" system—only a series of trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (the CAP theorem). Core Pillars of System Design (According to Sen)

A fan favorite. Here, Sen moves beyond simple request-response to and Long Polling . He addresses the "Last Seen" timestamp problem and how to handle presence detection across millions of concurrent connections. He famously contrasts REST APIs (Stateless) with WebSocket Servers (Stateful) and explains how to scale the latter using Redis Pub/Sub.