Hi! I'm Arjay, Software Engineer and Creator. I use this space to share cool interactive tools I've built.

Software Engineer Writer Creator

Want to chat with me and practice system design every day? Check out The Daily Dev, my community and app for engineers. Also available on the App Store.

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Interactive tools and demos.

Small interactive things I've built for engineers and creators. More on the way.

Tool · Interactive Live

Stack Picker

Browse the current tools across every layer, pick a complete stack so you don't miss a piece, and walk away with a ready-to-paste LLM prompt to help you design the whole system.

Tool · Tier List Live

System Design Tier List

Drag-and-drop the databases, caches, queues, and runtimes you'd actually pick in 2026. Share your ranking. A cheeky way to take the temperature of the ecosystem.

Tool · Tier List Live

Languages Tier List

Rank the 14 major programming languages. Tap any chip to see 2026 US salary, job openings, difficulty, and trend direction, all with cited sources from TIOBE, Stack Overflow, Octoverse, and Glassdoor.

Tool · Interactive Live

Database Simulations

Interactive simulations for six of the most common database types: relational, key-value, wide-column, object, vector, and graph. Storage, mutations, access patterns, and behavior under load.

Tool · Walkthrough Live

System Evolution

Exactly how and what parts of your system to scale at each stage of growth. From a single VM to a distributed system.

Tool · Simulator Live

Caching Strategies

Pick a caching strategy, change the load, watch the system respond. Cache-aside, read-through, write-through, write-behind, and refresh-ahead, with live stats and failure-mode scenarios.

Tool · Walkthrough Live

Hosting Your First Server

From npm start on localhost to a real HTTPS URL. Five pieces: a server, your app, a process manager, a reverse proxy, a domain. Diagrams plus the exact commands to run on your own box.

The Core Series.

Free, long-form guides for engineers at every stage. Drop your email, get the PDF.

Guide 01 · PDF 2026 playbook

Dominate any job as a CS Major in 2026

Turn your CS degree into a true competitive advantage in the 2026 job market by leveraging your real strengths: systems thinking, problem-solving, strategic decision-making, and the ability to design and lead AI-powered workflows across any team or industry.

Guide 02 · PDF ~40 pages

My Ultimate System Design Guide

A concise system design guide tailored to the questions you'll get in interviews and the decisions you'll make when designing real large-scale distributed systems. Not a textbook. Not a 300-page monologue on distributed systems theory. Just ~40 pages that get you where you need to be.

Guide 03 · PDF ~20 pages

The Ultimate Personal Project Playbook

A playbook for ideating, planning, and building a personal project. A zero-to-one guide that covers everything from picking a tech stack to deploying and trying to get a couple users.

Guide 04 · PDF 12-week playbook

How to Lock In a Return Offer as an Intern

A week-by-week playbook for turning a big-tech internship into a return offer. Built from 3x return offers and years of mentoring interns who got theirs too. The first, middle, and final thirds, and exactly what to do in each.

Guide 05 · PDF 10-chapter roadmap

The Ultimate Backend Roadmap

The path I would tell a friend to follow if they wanted to become a backend engineer and get a job doing it. By the end you have one complete, deployed, tested service that touches almost everything a real production system does.

Get the dev download.

One email each week. A system-design teardown, a tool I shipped, or a short note from the margins. Built for engineers who ship.