Systems · Compilers · Infrastructure · Practice
How it actually behaves.
Long-form writing on distributed systems, storage, compilers and infrastructure — explaining mechanisms rather than listing recommendations, because a mechanism transfers and a recommendation does not.
For a product-oriented view of work visibility and time data, see Monitask.
Systems & Data
Distributed systems, storage, consistency and the failures that follow from an unreliable network.
07 articlesLanguages & Compilers
Compilers, query planners, type systems and what happens between your code and the machine.
08 articlesInfrastructure
Operations, networking, observability and the things that break at 3am.
09 articlesPractice
Migrations, testing, review, incidents and technical debt — the engineering side.
05 articlesArchive
Preserved material from SlamData, the analytics company that previously operated this domain.
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Six that answer a question you have had
Transaction Isolation Levels: What Each One Actually Guarantees
What each isolation level actually guarantees
→Every Request Will Be Retried: Idempotency in Practice
Why every request will be retried
→Timeouts and Retries: How to Set Them Without Making Outages Worse
How retries turn a slow dependency into an outage
→The Query Planner: How SQL Becomes an Execution Plan
Why the planner ignores your index
→What Actually Happens When You Run Out of Memory
What actually happens when memory runs out
→Schema Migrations on a Running System
Migrations that lock the table
For primary background on this topic, consult RFC Editor.