Some code teaches you an algorithm. Some code teaches you a way of thinking. The snippets below are in the
Continue readingFive Code Gems From Quake, Redis, Linux, Python, and SQLite — and What They Teach
Here is a failure mode that shows up in every system with more than two backends: round robin distributes requests
Continue readingLoad Balancing Beyond Round Robin: Least Outstanding Requests and Consistent Hashing
Autoregressive decoding is the reason large language models feel slow: every token is generated by a full forward pass, and
PostgreSQL takes an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock for most ALTER TABLE operations. That lock conflicts with everything — reads, writes, even
Every UPDATE in PostgreSQL is secretly an INSERT-plus-a-tombstone. The old row version stays on disk, fully readable to any transaction
Continue readingMVCC and VACUUM in PostgreSQL: Dead Tuples, Autovacuum Tuning, and What PG18 Changed
Every high-concurrency network server on Linux eventually converges on the same bottleneck: not CPU, not memory, but the question of
Continue readingepoll Under the Hood: How Linux Event Loops Actually Work
Every go process you ship is quietly running a second program: the garbage collector. It shares your heap, pauses your
Continue readingGo Memory Management Under the Hood: Allocator, Stacks, Escape Analysis, and GC