Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Single-request idempotency is a solved problem: the client sends a unique key, the server records the response keyed by that key, and retries return the cached response without
A sea urchin has hundreds of independently controllable hydraulic actuators that double as locomotion, feeding, respiration, and sensory organs. The water-vascular system is one of the few completely novel body plans in animal evolution, and it works on principles that human engineering has not d...
When the database feels slow but no individual query is slow, the answer is usually visible in pg_stat_activity. Reading connection states and wait events is the diagnostic skill that separates intermediate from senior Postgres operators.
Changelogs are read by maybe ten percent of customers. The other ninety percent discover changes when something breaks. The patterns that close this gap are not technical; they are about which changes warrant which notification channel.
Most teams optimize the queries they think are slow. The pg_stat_statements extension shows the queries that are actually consuming database time, which is often a different set entirely.
A health check endpoint that returns 200 for everything is a load balancer's favorite and an operator's worst friend. The distinction between liveness, readiness, and dependency health is what makes the difference under real production conditions.
An SLA is a promise to customers that becomes a constraint on engineering. Getting the promise wrong is expensive in either direction: too generous and you cannot deliver, too conservative and customers do not trust the number.
The zipper looks like an obvious invention. The history says otherwise: 80 years from first patent to commercial success, multiple bankrupt companies, and a problem that turned out to be much harder than it appeared.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE tells you how long each operator took. EXPLAIN ANALYZE BUFFERS tells you why. The buffer accounting separates cache hits from disk reads and turns most performance mysteries into questions about cache fit.
Some operations take longer than a request-response cycle can hold. A status API has to tell the customer what is happening without keeping the connection open. The three patterns are polling, webhooks, and SSE, and they fit different customer profiles.
The sundial dominated timekeeping for 4000 years before the mechanical clock. The achievement was not the gnomon but the mathematics that made the markings correct, and the institutional discipline that kept civic time consistent across generations.
Postgres tables are heap-organized: rows live wherever there is free space. For most queries this does not matter. For range scans on a correlated column, physical order matters enormously, and CLUSTER is the tool that fixes it.