Worth reading
28 articles about engineering.
Everything I know about good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
When random is not actually random enough
A short lesson in API design
PlanetScale Released Text Search and We Have a Lot to Say (Part I)
Two BM25 optimizations and benchmark configuration changes inspired by PlanetScale's TIN benchmarks make ParadeDB's text search faster without changing its document identifiers.
RIP, vector database
Turbopuffer covers how they are designing v3 of their storage engine
turbopuffer is pushing the frontier of search. To do that, we have to fundamentally redesign our storage architecture so the vector index is no longer primary.
Saving another 100TB of RAM with math (and Rust)
Great example of using probability to trade exactness for huge memory wins.
Cloudflare's global network is immense but not limitless. As we look for small ways to trim our resource usage, we sometimes get lucky and we can cut significantly more. Here's how we reduced one of our Pingora-based service's RAM usage with statistics.
Redis City — inside one Redis
An interactive 3D Redis visualization, from command parsing and key lookup to the allocator, memory pages, RDB, and AOF.
How we saved 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache
Five Rust-level memory optimizations to the DNS cache layout of Big Pineapple cut per-entry memory by 56%, freeing approximately 100 TB of memory across Cloudflare's fleet.
Git at any scale
Probably one of the most interesting posts I’ve read in a while. Written by someone who worked at GitHub for 10 years, it covers how GitHub works and how they’re using S3 to build Origin.
tl;dv (Too Lazy; Didn't Validate): 181,874 Meetings Left Wide Open
How a missing Firestore security rule on tl;dv exposed 181,874 meetings from 84,312 users across 35,003 domains, including live calls I could join uninvited, and how six months of disclosure got me nothing but seen receipts.
We're building Postgres in Rust. Using the LLVM of databases
Turso is becoming the LLVM of databases: one modern, reliable Rust core with many SQL frontends. After rewriting SQLite, we are now building Postgres.
Making 768 servers look like 1
How to make 768 distinct Postgres servers look like 1 to your applications.
Rewriting Bun in Rust
Why & how we rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust
British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres
This year, British Column has moved to year-round Pacific Time. How does that affect date data?
Train Your Judgement
Settling for good enough is not good enough.
Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) running natively on the Nintendo Wii
We Built a Video Rendering Engine by Lying to the Browser About What Time It Is
How Replit turns any web page into a deterministic video by virtualizing time itself, patching key browser audio APIs, and waging war against headless Chrome's quirks.
Game Boy Advance Audio Interpolation
An audio enhancement a Game Boy Advance emulator can implement to reduce aliasing and noise, by replacing the hardware's nearest-neighbor resampling with better interpolation.
Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users
An inside look at how OpenAI scaled PostgreSQL to millions of queries per second using replicas, caching, rate limiting, and workload isolation.