Writing

Notes I wish I’d had earlier.

I write when I’ve had to understand something well enough to explain it without the usual fog—mostly databases, distributed systems, and production performance.

11 min read

What is actually slowing your database down?

A practical tour of ACID costs, B-Trees, LSM Trees, compaction, and Bloom filters—and the trade-offs behind each one.

databasessystem design
8 min read

Kafka is fast for surprisingly ordinary reasons

Sequential I/O, the page cache, and zero-copy explain most of the story. Here is how they fit together.

Kafkaperformance