Long-form deep dives and build logs on databases, Kubernetes, Linux networking and Go. Every diagram is hand-drawn.
14 posts
Build log
Every minute, every open order against every rider on duty, solved as one vehicle routing problem with VROOM. How the round works, why the solver's answer is only a proposal, and why the legs are diffed instead of rebuilt.
17 min read
Build log
One search box, six indexes, one round trip. How I built a multi-vertical search in Go on Elasticsearch, why it rebuilds its indexes instead of syncing them, and how I would sync them at a million documents per vertical.
16 min read
Build log
at and cron as a service, in Go: six services, MySQL as the queue, Cassandra for history. The decisions behind it, their trade-offs, and what load-testing it on an AWS-shaped bench found, including a bug of mine.
onSystem Design postsDatabase Internals postsGo posts
11 min read · Part 1 of Building a distributed job scheduler
Build log
An EKS and RDS lookalike on one PC, a cron platform with 30,000 jobs due at 09:00:00, and ten tests. Nothing was lost; the 300 jobs/s ceiling turned out to be an N+1 of mine.
onSystem Design postsDatabase Internals postsGo posts
11 min read · Part 3 of Building a distributed job scheduler
Build log
Why the jobs table is the queue, why MySQL and not Postgres, why Cassandra only for history, and how leases, fencing tokens and idempotency keys keep at-least-once honest. With the alternatives I rejected and the SQL behind each decision.
onSystem Design postsDatabase Internals postsGo posts
12 min read · Part 2 of Building a distributed job scheduler
Deep dive
The image never reaches the API server. What reaches it is a few hundred bytes of YAML. Tracing the real path from a commit to a process inside a container — a chain of independent loops, none of which knows the others exist.
onKubernetes & Platform postsLinux & Networking posts
14 min read
Deep dive
I thought I understood net/http's connection pool. Then I found out the pool key ignores the path entirely, and that my own Transport config had silently turned off HTTP/2. Three discoveries, measured with httptrace.
onGo postsLinux & Networking posts
8 min read · Part 2 of net/http under the hood
Deep dive
When a hot cache key expires, N concurrent requests all miss and slam the same expensive query at once. golang.org/x/sync/singleflight collapses them into a single execution. Here's the problem it solves and exactly how it works inside.
8 min read
Deep dive
From done channels to context trees. How Go's context package solves cancellation propagation, deadline management, and request-scoped data across concurrent call graphs.
onGo posts
16 min read
Deep dive
What really happens when you INSERT a row in Postgres. The WAL, dirty pages, checkpointing, LSNs, replication slots, and how all of this connects to CDC and Debezium.
8 min read
Deep dive
How database indexes work internally with B+ Trees, why transactions lock rows, and how both are deeply connected. Explained for backend engineers who want to stop guessing.
12 min read
Deep dive
A deep dive into Go's sync package and atomic operations. Mutex, RWMutex, WaitGroup, Cond, Once, sync.Map, and atomic types explained with real examples and common pitfalls.
onGo posts
9 min read
Deep dive
Understand how Go's RoundTripper works, the low-level mechanism behind every HTTP request. Learn to customize it for logging, retry, headers, and more.
onGo posts
4 min read · Part 1 of net/http under the hood
Deep dive
Finally understand what listen(), accept(), and the TCP handshake really do. No more confusion.
4 min read · Part 1 of Networking for dummies
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