Distributed systems
Designing services that stay predictable across boundaries, under load, and when parts of the system inevitably fail.
Victor Harding · Software Engineer · South Africa
I build software
that businesses
can depend on.
I focus on distributed systems, backend engineering and system design, where reliability, correctness and scalability matter.
What I work on
Clearer architecture. Safer change. Software built to keep its promises.
Core expertise
Engineering for the moments that matter.
Backend engineering
Building robust application cores, APIs, data models and integrations around the realities of the business.
System design
Making architecture, ownership and trade-offs clear enough for software to evolve without losing coherence.
Reliability & modernisation
Moving critical systems forward safely while improving observability, correctness and operational confidence.
How I think
Reliable systems are designed with reality in mind.
My background is in backend engineering, databases, event-driven systems and platform architecture, particularly in complex financial and transactional environments.
I think carefully about how systems behave under failure, how to modernise them safely, and how to keep them understandable as they grow.
01
Correctness before cleverness.
02
Failure is a design input.
03
Complexity must earn its place.
04
Software should serve the business.
Latest writing
Ideas for systems that need to last.
Distributed Systems
Designing for failure without designing for everything
A practical way to make failure a useful design input without turning every service into a fortress.
Read article →System Design
Service boundaries that survive growth
Why stable ownership and data rules matter more than drawing smaller boxes around code.
Read article →Backend Engineering
Idempotency is a business rule, not an HTTP detail
How to reason about duplicate work in transactional systems where retrying is unavoidable.
Read article →About
I’m Victor, a software engineer based in South Africa.
I work on the difficult parts of software: distributed behaviour, backend foundations, architecture, data and the operational reality around them.
More about me →Speaking
Turning difficult engineering ideas into useful conversations.
I’m available for conference talks, meetups, podcasts, panels and internal engineering sessions.
Speaking topics →