The Accidental CTO by Subhash Choudhary

• September 28, 2025 at 22:21 IST
• tech

Came across this cool eBook The Accidental CTO written by Subhash Choudhary, the Dukaan CTO. He shares the story of scaling Dukaan from zero to a million stores, without even having a CS degree.

He will be discussing the below topics in the ebook which will be an interesting read.

• Scaling applications: How we went from thousands to millions of users without falling apart.
• Replication, sharding, caching, queues: When to use them, when not to, and what tradeoffs they carry.
• Observability as survival: Why metrics, logs, traces, SLAs, and SLOs aren’t optional — they’re lifelines.
• Resilience engineering: Circuit breakers, retries, graceful degradation — designing for failure, not against it.
• The hidden costs of cloud: Why at scale, your AWS bill can become your biggest investor, and when it makes sense to go self-hosted.
• The consistency/availability/latency triangle: Why you can never fully win, and how to navigate the tradeoffs in real systems.

I have started reading it already, and loving it so far.

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