Writing
Notes from what I'm reading, building, and figuring out.
Featured
Building Paxos from Scratch in Go
Implementing the algorithm that taught me distributed systems are mostly about being paranoid about network partitions.
Recent
- Eight Tools I Keep Rewriting Every couple years I rewrite the same eight little CLIs. Here they are, and why they're worth doing.
- On Reading Old Papers Why the 1978 papers still teach better than the latest blog post — and how I read them now.
- Time, Clocks, and Why You Probably Need Vector Clocks Wall clock skew, NTP drift, and what Lamport actually solved. With diagrams.
- Debugging Distributed Systems Without Losing Your Mind Structured logging, correlation IDs, and the one tool that beat my Jaeger habit.
- When gRPC Is Worth It (and When REST Wins Anyway) A decision framework based on team shape, debugging needs, and how often your schema changes.
From the archive
- Bringing Up a Compiler Frontend in Two Weekends
- Cache-Aware Data Structures Are Worth Knowing
- Notes from Fine-Tuning Small Language Models
- How Rust Async Actually Works Under the Hood
- Mathematical Formulas — Rendering Test
- Binary Search — The Algorithm That Keeps Showing Up Everywhere
- Why Knowing Algorithms Actually Matters
- Is Reality a Shared Hallucination?