The Scaling Playbook

The Scaling Playbook From WordPress to 1 million orders. One company's 5-year journey through every scaling decision, mistake, and hard-won principle. No code. No fluff. Just architecture thinking.

Andie Nguyen

The Scaling Playbook From WordPress to 1 million orders. One company's 5-year journey through every scaling decision, mistake, and hard-won principle. No code. No fluff. Just architecture thinking.

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The Scaling Playbook

What if you could learn 5 years of architecture mistakes in a single weekend?

"The Scaling Playbook" follows Andie Solutions—a fictional e-commerce startup—from their first WordPress site handling 100 orders to a global platform processing 1 million+ orders daily.

This isn't another theoretical architecture book. It's a story-driven guide through the real decisions, trade-offs, and hard lessons that come with scaling systems.

You'll learn:

- Why starting with a monolith is usually the RIGHT choice

- When microservices make sense—and when they're organizational theater

- How to design database schemas that won't collapse under load

- Caching strategies that actually work in production

- The SAGA pattern for distributed transactions without losing your mind

- Kubernetes thinking (not just Kubernetes commands)

- Multi-region architecture for global scale

- Event Sourcing & CQRS when traditional CRUD isn't enough

Each chapter introduces a new scaling challenge, walks through the options, and explains WHY certain decisions were made—not just WHAT was built.

By the end, you'll have 17 battle-tested principles and a mental framework for making architecture decisions in your own context.

No code samples to copy-paste. No "best practices" to blindly follow. Just clear thinking about systems.

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About the Author

Andie Nguyen

I'm Andie Nguyen, a Senior Software Engineer and Technical Lead with 10 years of experience building systems that scale.

I've led international engineering teams across Korea, Japan, Australia, Germany, and Singapore—shipping everything from food delivery platforms handling millions of orders to GPU rental marketplaces and real-time financial systems.

My technical toolkit spans Python (FastAPI), Java/Kotlin (Spring Boot), Go, and modern frontend frameworks, with deep expertise in microservices architecture, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes).

Some projects I'm proud of:

- Technical Lead for a Korean food delivery platform (30-person team, microservices + SAGA pattern)

- Architect for an Australian digital lending marketplace (event-driven architecture)

- Senior Engineer on Deputy's real-time communication services (Go, gRPC, WebSocket)

I hold a Physics degree from Vietnam National University, where I won Second Prize in the National Physics Olympiad. I believe the best architectures aren't the most complex—they're the ones just complex enough to solve the problem at hand.

I write about scaling systems, architecture decisions, and the trade-offs nobody tells you about.

Connect: linkedin.com/in/andie-nguyen | github.com/nghiahsgs

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