My literature search for recent work on composing self-stabilizing systems didn't yield anything useful. The layered stabilization idea was ...

AI doomerism is everywhere these days. Every field, and recently humanity as a whole, has had its "we're finished" post. In contrast to the ...

Aleksey and I are back to reading papers live. This paper, Jetpack(OSDI '26), attempts building a universal 1-RTT fast-path framework that ...

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Last week I wrote about modular verification of systems through open TLA+ specs and rely-guarantee discharge. In this post, I apply the sam...

Today, tech folk are scrambling to change their workflows to meet newly inflated 5X productivity quotas, while getting pummeled under the co...

The premise of this position paper is appealing . We know Brooks' Law : adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. That is, ...

TLA+ is compositional in the abstract sense... In the astral plane, a program execution is an infinite sequence of states, each state giving...

I am a distributed systems researcher. I mostly read and write about distributed systems and lightweight formal methods. But as my blog defi...

Database research papers keep adding benchmarks every year, crowding out fundamental new research: stats from analyzing 800 published papers.

Specula is an agentic system that automates the process of software bug finding through authoring and model-checking a spec for the code. ...

An immune system for SAT solvers

The Aurora DSQL paper finally dropped . Reading it yesterday was an interesting experience, because I spent two years (2022-23) working with...

Metastability has been studied in previous work as a self-sustaining degradation in goodput that persists even after the trigger is gone. T...

Moving is not for the faint of heart! The surgeon general should issue a warning against moving houses after age 50 . Coordinating our cross...

Looking at my peak male physique, and my Keanu Reeves baby face, you would never suspect it, but I recently turned 50. As is the tradition, ...

In 1957, Parkinson postulated his "Law of Triviality" using a fictitious committee reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. The reactor d...

We spent 10 days in Italy in early April. It was a lot of fun. Back when I was a grad student, I stayed in Pisa for a month for a "summer sc...

Shortly after I joined MongoDB research, we ran a TLA+ workshop. It was a two-day ordeal. We had a 1.5 days of instruction on TLA+ and synta...

The transformative power of LLMs in coding has been irrefutable, and it feels like we are living through a magical computing renaissance. On...

As I mentioned in my previous post , I traveled to San Jose at the end of May for the ACM CAIS conference. On Day 0, I gave a very short tal...

Last week, I traveled to San Jose to attend the ACM CAIS conference . On Day 0, I gave a short talk at the Supporting our AI Overlords (SAO)...

Chess is a lot trickier than it looks. It has so many rules: castling, en passant, pawn promotion, pinning, the discovered check, and the de...

I listened to this book as an audiobook through the Libby app, which basically brings your public library to your phone. The Thinking Machin...

When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...

Ok, finally getting sometime to put my butt down to write about day 2 of BugBash. Why do so few buildings fall down? Brian Potter, Senior In...

These are my notes from the afternoon sessions of BugBash'26 . We had a 75 minute lunch break. Nice lunch, but there were no vegetarian entr...

Notes from the 2026 conference on autonomous testing and software correctness.

Continuing with notes from the BugBash talks. Yes, all of this goodness, including Will Wilson's keynote was before lunch the first day. Wh...

I attended the BugBash 2026 these last two days, and had a blast. Here are my notes from the first keynote. I will try to find time to publ...

As part of our zoom reading group ( wow, 4.5 years old now ), we discussed a paper that uses LLMs for automatic root cause analysis (RCA) fo...

This is a short chapter covering the nuts and bolts of memory allocation in C: malloc(), free(), and the many ways programmers get them wro...

Paxos consensus protocol, despite its many theoretical virtues, is fundamentally rude. One need only look at the way it behaves to see the p...

This paper from METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) introduces a new metric for tracking AI progress: the "50%-task-completion time h...

Chapter 13 of OSTEP provides a primer on how and why modern operating systems abstract physical hardware. This is part of our series going t...