Reddit Backend in Microservices
A Reddit backend decomposed into services that talk over gRPC and Protocol Buffers rather than HTTP. Built to work through service boundaries and typed inter-service contracts properly, before doing the same thing in production.
Overview
The core of Reddit — accounts, posts, comments, votes — taken apart into separate services and put back together over gRPC. The point was never the product; it was the seams. Deciding where one service ends and the next begins, and then having to live with that decision, teaches more than reading about it does.
Why gRPC
Protocol Buffers give the boundary a schema that both sides compile against, so a breaking change fails at build time instead of in production at 2am. REST between internal services would have been easier to start and worse to maintain. It is the same instinct that later showed up at work as message queues between services that must not block each other.
Honest scope
A short build from 2022, archived, with no users and no stars. It is here because it shows distributed-systems fundamentals, not popularity — and because those fundamentals are the part of my work that is hardest to see from a job title.