Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
When a list endpoint returns 30 fields per object and the customer wants 3, response sizes compound across pages and machines. Field selection is the underused API pattern that makes large responses survivable.
The helicopter took 500 years from concept to practical flight, longer than almost any other modern aircraft. The reason was not lack of imagination. The reason was that the physics of rotary-wing flight is much harder than the physics of fixed-wing flight, and the engineering had to wait fo...
The view that tells you whether your logical replication subscriber is actually keeping up. Reading pg_stat_subscription is half the diagnostic story that pg_stat_replication on the primary cannot tell you alone.
The system view that lets you read the same statistics the planner reads. Reading pg_stats is one of the most underused diagnostics for understanding why a query plan looks the way it does.
Soft delete is one of the small design choices that compounds. Get it right and customer recovery is a routine surface. Get it wrong and you spend years restoring from backups for individual mistakes.
Elevators existed for two thousand years before they reshaped cities. The transformation took a single demonstration of a small mechanical device at the 1853 New York World's Fair.
The 1913 discovery in a Sheffield laboratory of an iron alloy that did not rust. The decades of resistance before the kitchen took it seriously. And the metallurgical fact that made it possible.
The view that tells you whether your background writer is keeping up, whether your checkpoints are spread out properly, and whether your backends are doing write work they should not be doing.
How to extend the single-item update semantic to operate on hundreds of resources at once without producing the half-applied failure mode that bulk endpoints commonly inherit from naive scaling of single-item APIs.
The view that tells you how far behind each replica is, in three different units, with the asymmetric reading discipline that makes the difference between catching problems early and finding out at failover.
The most-used endpoint shape in any API and the one that most often grows unmaintainable through accumulated filter parameters and ordering options. The patterns that hold up across years of customer integration evolution.
Tibetan iron-chain bridges six centuries before Telford. Wind-flutter collapses that took 110 years to understand. And the form that emerged in the late 18th century has stayed recognizably the same while spanning ten times the distance.