Writing

39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.

3 articles matching “Storage Engine”

Picking the Right DBMay 2, 202622 min read

LSM Trees, the Deep Cut — MemTable, WAL, SSTables, Compaction and Why Your Writes Are So Fast

A senior-engineer walkthrough of Log-Structured Merge Trees: MemTable + WAL durability, SSTable layout with sparse index and bloom filters, the L0→Ln level hierarchy, leveled vs tiered vs FIFO compaction, the three…

ObservabilityJul 13, 202616 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…

Tradeoffs in ProductionJul 12, 202615 min read

The Queue That Ate Your Latency — Why Backpressure, Not a Bigger Buffer, Is How Systems Survive Overload

When a service buckles under load, the first instinct is to make the buffer bigger — and it's the most natural wrong answer in systems engineering.