A Story of SOA, Spacecraft, and Bad English

The system is technically up, effectively down.

Active incidents can be cognitively brutal.

The cache didn't change. The code didn't change. The system grew around the cache, and the cache quietly became load-bearing.

Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload.

And You're Invited

Your system isn't broken because of bad engineering. It's broken because you're reacting to events without seeing the structure that produces them.

Your SSD doesn't just store data, it relies on quantum physics to do it.

The cold start problem is a chicken-and-egg trap: no users without value, no value without users.

Deletes, Tombstones, and Compaction

Durability with Write-Ahead Logging

There’s no issue with abstracting code into a helper function. If we want to optimize for cognitive load, the intent should be as clear as possible, starting with the name.

LSM Tree Foundations

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

In-Memory Store

In total, there were six known radiation overdoses involving the Therac-25,and at least three were fatal.

Classic essay about how software routinely bumbles human names.

No matter when or how often the nodes sync, they always end up with the same state.

Agentic Design Patterns A Hands-On Guide to Building Intelligent Systems, Antonio Gulli Table of Contents - total 424 pages = 1+2+1+1+4+9+103+61+34+114+74+5+4 11 Dedication, 1 page Acknowledgment,...

I love sharing, and you give me an audience.

A codebase is like a garden: left to grow organically, it becomes colorful but chaotic.

This article was adapted from a Google Tech on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT epis...

An explanation of how Linux handles system calls on x86-64 and why they show up as expensive operations in performance profiles

Life itself is unrepeatable in its details.

Sometimes, we can’t make things faster, but we can make them feel faster.

Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even eas

wal3, Chroma's write-ahead log, combining a 30-year-old lock-free algorithm with S3's newest conditional writes feature.

Your mind is for having ideas, but without a second brain, those ideas fade into memory.

Strongly Happens Before? It started innocently enough. I just wanted to brush up on C++ memory orderings. It’s been a while since I last stared into the abyss of std::atomic, so I figured, why not rev...

I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another ...

Why do we use caches at all? Can databases fully replace them?

Neural networks are more useful when placed in a suitable, specialized environment.

When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…

Making programs slower can be useful to find...

Feeling overwhelmed by the endless stream of tech content? At The Coder Cafe, we serve timeless concepts with your coffee. Written by a Google SWE and published author, we help you grow as an engineer...

Sometimes, we can’t make things faster—but we can make them feel faster.