Indexed, Eventually

Indexed, Eventually is a system design podcast where two senior engineers break down how large-scale post search systems are built—and where they break first.

Using a Facebook-style post search as a running example, we dive into inverted indexes, write-heavy ingestion, ranking by likes vs recency, caching strategies, and the tradeoffs between freshness, cost, and performance. We talk through real constraints: high write volume, massive storage, hot vs cold data, and why “just sort at query time” never works.

No buzzwords—just practical design decisions and honest tradeoffs.