Blog

Jan 6, 2025

Postgres had the right index and still walked 18 million rows for a LIMIT 1 query. I built the failure locally, followed the planner's estimate back into pg_stats, and fixed it with a higher per-column statistics target.

Dec 15, 2024

Reflections on how remote work has changed the way we think, collaborate, and find meaning in our professional lives.

Dec 15, 2024

A reflection on what it means to build software that matters, beyond just solving technical problems.

Mar 21, 2023

Learn how independent deployability, functional cohesion, and coupling help define architecture quanta for robust distributed systems.

Mar 12, 2023

A critical look at how data-intensive systems can impact society, exploring issues like predictive analytics, surveillance, biases, and the responsibilities of engineers.

Mar 3, 2023

Explore strategies to build reliable and fault-tolerant systems while handling limitations in transactions, data corruption, and distributed coordination.

Feb 26, 2023

Learn how unbundling databases helps to achieve scalability and flexibility, combining specialized tools to meet modern data needs.

Feb 18, 2023

Explore the intricacies of data integration in distributed applications, including synchronizing specialized systems and maintaining correctness across diverse data sources.

Feb 11, 2023

Examine how unbounded data streams are processed in real-time applications, including operators, time reasoning, joins, and fault tolerance.

Feb 3, 2023

Examine how streams integrate with databases through change data capture, event sourcing, and the immutability of state, enabling real-time system synchronization.

Jan 25, 2023

Explore how messaging systems and partitioned logs enable reliable and scalable transmission of event streams within distributed systems.

Jan 17, 2023

Explore alternatives to MapReduce, including advanced dataflow engines and their benefits in efficiency, iterative graph processing, and high-level abstractions.