Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
pg_trgm decomposes strings into three-character sequences and uses them to accelerate LIKE, ILIKE, and similarity queries. It is one of the highest-leverage Postgres extensions for small-to-medium scale search problems where the reflexive answer is to install Elasticsearch.
The wheel is one of the oldest human technologies, but the modern bicycle wheel with thin wire spokes radiating from a hub is barely 150 years old. The conceptual leap from wood-spoke to wire-spoke was small. The engineering leap that made it work took 30 years and most of the inventors are for
Customers configure webhook endpoints once and forget them. When the endpoint goes away (DNS dies, cert expires, app gets decommissioned, team moves on), the API keeps retrying. After enough failures, the right answer is to stop. The harder question is what counts as enough.
pg_stat_statements is one of the most useful extensions for understanding what your database is doing. The companion view pg_stat_statements_info tells you whether the statistics collector itself is healthy. Most teams never look at it. They should.
Most pagination tutorials show you how to build cursor URLs from response metadata. RFC 8288 Link headers turn that into the API's responsibility, so clients follow URLs without constructing them. The result is fewer client-side bugs and more freedom to evolve the URL scheme.
Between 1880 and 1980, the global telephone network ran on electromechanical switches that were essentially complex computing machines built from relays, motors, and brass wipers. Almon Strowger's 1891 step-by-step switch was the first, and its descendants carried civilization-scale voice traff
Every UPDATE in Postgres looks atomic from the outside. Inside, it is a complex dance of new tuple versions, index pointers, and dead row cleanup. HOT updates short-circuit the most expensive part of that dance, but only when the schema and access pattern cooperate.
In 1945 a Raytheon engineer noticed a candy bar melting in his pocket near a radar magnetron and within twelve months had a patent and a 750-pound floor-mounted prototype. The 70-year arc from radar component to nearly every kitchen on Earth is one of the cleaner examples of a wartime technolog
postgresql.conf tells you what you intended. pg_settings tells you what the database is actually using right now, where each value came from, and whether changing it would require a restart. It is the introspection view every operator should know.
Webhook payloads come in two flavors: a complete snapshot of the resource at the moment the event fired, or a reference customers must follow with an API call to get the current state. The choice has consequences that scale with the volume and value of the integration.
The steam locomotive era was 130 years long, ended within a generation, and reorganized human geography more than any technology since agriculture. The mechanism was a heavy boiler on iron wheels that displaced horses, dissolved local time, and made the modern world structurally possible.
The information_schema views are slow and incomplete. The underlying pg_class and pg_attribute catalogs are fast, exhaustive, and the right tool when you need to know what the database actually knows about itself, not what the SQL standard says it should expose.