Infographic 01 · D3

Thirty-four projects, ranked

Scored on how much real distributed-systems engineering each carries, not on how impressive the work looks. Differences under about five points are ties, not an ordering.

Score out of 120, banded by tierhover a row

The bands are real cut-offs in the rubric, not decoration. The top three sit within five points of each other. That gap is noise, and the ordering between them is a judgement about which one is the more canonical design problem, not a measurement.

The rubric, weight × rating, max 120

Canonical DS primitives ×5Partitioning, event logs, idempotency, fan-out, backpressure

Production evidence ×4Deployed, measured, runbooked, failure modes named

Concurrency correctness ×4Races found, fixed, and tested for

Scale artifacts ×3Shard keys, consumer groups, TTLs, hot keys

Language fit ×3Go, Java, Python, C++

Contract discipline ×2OpenAPI / AsyncAPI / protobuf, CI-enforced

Written communication ×2Design docs stating trade-offs and costs

Frontend / mobile ×1Real work; not what this role hires on

The table behind the chart

#	Project	Tier	Score
2	GlobalChat Realtime Messaging	S	106
1	Billboard Activity Graph	S	103
3	Match Service, Distributed Ranking	S	101
4	Solomon, Serving, Kubernetes & Autoscaling	A	90
5	Solomon, LLM Platform (umbrella)	A	89
6	FeedBench, One Contract, Three Runtimes	A	89
7	Production Incidents, Root-Caused	A	87
8	Billboard Production Hardening	A	84
9	WebRTC Calling Plane	A	83
10	BillboardML, Audio Recognition & Recommendation	A	83
11	Storefront Money Spine & Connect Payouts	A	81
12	Media & Upload Infrastructure	A	80
13	Push & Notification Pipeline	A	79
14	Global Feed Gateway	A	78
15	Solomon, Retrieval & Agent Tier	A	75
16	Platform Operations & CI/CD	B	73
17	Billboard Library Sync & The One 100 Charts	B	72
18	Auth & Identity Platform	B	70
19	GlobalChat Messaging UI	B	70
20	Realtime Gateway Trio	B	69
21	Cloudflare Edge Platform	B	68
22	Solomon, Evaluation Gates & Promotion	B	65
23	Portfolio Platform on Workers	B	64
24	Solomon, Training & Experiment Tracking	B	63
25	Dating Swipe Deck & Discovery UI	B	62
26	BoxOffice & the Moderator Console	B	61
27	OpenHouse Global	C	57
28	Billboard Player, Audio UI & Engine	C	56
29	Palantir J8, Exhibit Factory	C	55
30	Multiplatform Clients (umbrella)	C	54
31	Solomon, The Transformer	C	53
32	Web Platform UI	C	51
33	Solomon, Corpus, Tokenizer & Data Governance	C	46
34	Technical Documentation Corpus	C	39