B-Trees or LSM-Trees: Your Database Already Chose
Every database picks a side in the same trade — quick to write, or quick to read. Almost every performance surprise you have had follows from which side it picked.
derpx06Notes on systems, models & learningLatest writingDatabases · 6 min · 15 Oct
Mobile Apps Are Distributed Systems With Terrible Networks
A phone is a copy of your data that vanishes without warning, holds changes for hours, and comes back disagreeing with everyone else. Most mobile bugs are really that problem, unlabelled.
Distributed Systems
What I Got Wrong About Document Modelling
Picking MongoDB takes five minutes. Deciding what one record should contain takes months to get wrong and is painful to undo.
Databases
Your Retry Made It Worse
Trying again after a failure is the most obvious safety net there is, and the easiest one to build backwards. It hinges on one question: did the first attempt actually fail?
Distributed Systems
MCP Is a Protocol, Not a Plugin System
The Model Context Protocol looks like a way to hand an AI some plugins. Treat it that way and you get tools that shine in a demo and go round in circles in real use.
Agents
Explainers — drawn, not written
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Finetuning an LLM
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What I read, built and got wrong.