Query Optimization13 min read
Vector Search Explained: From KNN to HNSW — A Complete Guide
How similarity search works under the hood — and why naive brute-force collapses at scale.
Writing
39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
5 articles matching “Search”
AI Agents18 min read
Two Agents, Two Handoff Rules, Zero Progress: The Deadlock Problem in AI Agent Systems
The Refund Agent will not refund until the carrier confirms the return. The Shipping Agent will not create a return label until the refund is approved.
Observability16 min read
Averages Are a Lie — The Long Tail That Quietly Runs Every System You Build, From p99 Latency to Hot Keys
The bell curve taught you the average is a fair summary and outliers are rare. In software both halves are false: latencies, key popularity, file sizes and follower counts are heavy-tailed power laws where the outliers…
Architecture Decisions22 min read
Life Beyond Distributed Transactions — Why Hyperscale Apps Quietly Abandoned 2PC, and the Two Words That Replaced It
A plain-language walkthrough of Pat Helland's 2007 classic "Life beyond Distributed Transactions" — the paper that named the patterns every large system already uses.
Production Incidents15 min read
The Brutal Truth About Multi-Tenant IoT Data Filtering: Every Obvious Solution Failed
A user had access to 1 lakh devices across MongoDB, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch. We tried seven approaches. All broke. The full journey — dead ends, edge cases, and what production systems actually do.