Series
Ordered reading paths, not tag dumps. Each series starts from first principles and the later instalments assume the earlier ones.
New instalments appear on their publish date.
- Database internals in production
From the B+ tree up: why indexes get ignored, what fsync actually costs, how isolation levels lie to you, and the schema decisions that only hurt at scale.
- Caching in anger
Write-through to consistent hashing: the failure modes that only show up under load, and why most cache incidents are design decisions coming home.
- Distributed systems failure modes
Consistency models, clocks, quorums, and the transactions that span machines. The mechanisms, and the specific ways each one fails in production.
- AI infrastructure without the hype
What LLM systems cost and where they break: connection pools, retrieval, caching, evals, guardrails, and the bill nobody attributes.
- Mechanical sympathy
The hardware under your abstractions: CPU caches, branch prediction, virtual memory, thread scaling, and why async is not parallelism.