Writing
13 posts on systems, software, and ideas
How I’m building a better way to understand and store legacy logs
Logslim is a log ingestion tool that runs the Drain log-parsing algorithm, separates repeating log templates from their variable parameters, and stores everything in compressed Parquet via DuckDB.
The Redundancy Paradox
Hardware usually breaks because of physics. Software breaks because of math and misunderstanding
The Quest for the Shortest Path
Our story begins in 1956 Amsterdam, where a young programmer named Edsger Dijkstra faced a simple question
Heartbeats in Distributed Systems
While implementing heartbeats in the Pensieve, I realized that there are essentially two ways of detecting node failure...
The Patronus Charm
That which does not make a man worse than he was, also does not make his life worse, nor does it harm him either from without or from within.
The Timezone Turbulence
In programming, the one thing you would either never come across (if everything goes well) or learn pretty much the hard way is handling Timezones and date calculations.
Metrics Mayhem
This is an incident that caused the disk I/O to surge by 200x, database latency to increase from a few milliseconds to ~30 seconds, and a perfectly running Grafana dashboard to turn into a digital sloth...
On Binary Search
After solving a few binary search problems on LeetCode, I’m beginning to appreciate the elegant generality of this algorithm...
How Websockets are Scaled
When a client initiates a Websocket connection, it sends an HTTP request with the `Upgrade` header set to `websocket`, signaling its intent to establish the connection. Once the TCP connection is established, each request must be routed to the correct server, which can add latency and processing overhead if examined at Layer 7...
Deepwalking in Clojure
If you were to guess the missing part of the sentence — “My name __ John Doe” what would you guess? Most people would answer this with an “is.” You essentially guess a word that has the highest probability of being there. Interestingly enough, machines also work the same way...
A Man with a 40 years old Backpack
On a Wednesday evening, as I stood in the parking lot after our weekly office football...
How Artists are Made
It has been around six years since I started learning to play the sitar. When I look back, I see that the part where I was learning “how to play the sitar” was just the initial 2 to 3 years. After that, it has been more about learning how to create quality music.
The Essence of Apache Kafka
Imagine that you go to your usual coffee place and encounter a gigantic queue. Going a little further, you realize that each individual has to wait in line until the coffee is prepared and handed over to them, as opposed to just placing the order at the counter and moving on...