6 Verbs to Explain System Designs (In English)

Language you can use to sound more technical and professional

Author

Sophie @ Speak Tech English
September 02, 2024

 

Happy September! In the US and Europe, summer is coming to an end. Productivity is increasing after many holidays in July and August, and hiring is starting to pick up again. It’s one of the best months to start looking for a new job! (Indeed).

Today we’ll give an example of how to describe a technical system. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with system designs - the vocabulary introduced can be applied to many technical concepts.

IN SIMPLE ENGLISH

The architecture of a typical web app

Source: ByteByteGo

1 - It all starts with CI/CD pipelines that deploy code to the server instances.

2 - User requests originate from the web browser. After DNS resolution, the requests reach the app servers.

3 - Load balancers and reverse proxies distribute user requests evenly across the web application servers.

4 - The requests can also be served by a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

5 - The web app communicates with backend services via APIs.

6 - The backend services interact with database servers or distributed caches to provide the data.

7 - Resource-intensive and long-running tasks are sent to job workers using a job queue.

8 - The full-text search service supports the search functionality.

9 - Monitoring tools store logs and help analyze data to ensure everything works fine.

10 - In case of issues, alerting services notify developers through platforms like Slack for quick resolution.

Source: Alex Yu at ByteByteGo

Are you using vocabulary like this when you explain systems or processes? Think about how you can incorporate these verbs, adjectives/adverbs and prepositions into your workflow.

Verbs

  • deploy: transfer and make available

  • originate: start from

  • distribute: divide between a number of people/things

  • serve: handled by

  • interact: communicate with something

  • notify: inform someone of an issue

Adjectives/Adverbs

  • evenly: equally

  • resource-intensive: tasks that require a lot of power, memory, etc..

  • long-running: tasks that take a lot of time to complete

Prepositions

  • via: through

QUIZ

(Answers at the bottom of the page)

As discussed in the section ‘In Simple English’ above, ‘via’ is a preposition which means through.

Question: Which sentence correctly uses ‘via’?

A: He drove via the new car he bought.

B: I’m flying from London to Singapore via Istanbul.

C: She decided to buy the house via it was too expensive.

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Quiz Answer: B (I’m flying from London to Singapore via Istanbul) - the sentence explains that the person will make a stop and change flights in Istanbul

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