Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
For most of human history, time was a local phenomenon. The day was divided into hours by sundials whose calibration depended on latitude and season. The night was
Search shows up early in the life of most SaaS products. A customer wants to find an invoice by the customer name on it. A team wants to
The standard webhook playbook assumes a desktop or server consumer. The receiver has a stable public URL, persistent network connectivity, and a server-side application that can be relied
Most teams reach for a denormalized column the same way every time. A new query needs to filter by lowercase email, or by month-of-creation, or by full-name-concatenated. The
Every API that accepts non-idempotent operations eventually has the duplicate-charge incident. A customer's mobile client retries a payment because the request appeared to hang. The original
The schoolroom version of the stirrup goes like this. Charles Martel adopted the stirrup, defeated the Umayyads at Tours in 732, and the resulting need for heavily armored
The wheel is the most-cited example of a primitive technology, but the engineering reality is the opposite. The wheel is a sophisticated solution that arrived late in human history, required several enabling technologies, and was independently invented far fewer times than most people assume.
The check-then-insert race condition is one of the oldest bugs in database programming. Postgres INSERT ON CONFLICT and the SQL standard MERGE give you atomic alternatives, but each has sharp corners that bite teams who reach for them without understanding the semantics.
Cache invalidation is famous as one of the two hard problems in computer science. Most of the difficulty is downstream of an earlier choice the team did not realize it was making: how the cache keys are structured. Get key design right, and invalidation becomes a one-line operation.
PgBouncer sits between your application and Postgres, multiplexing many client connections onto a small number of database connections. The pool mode you choose determines which Postgres features still work and which silently break.
Bulk import is the endpoint that wins or loses migration deals. A customer evaluating your API has a CSV from their old vendor and wants to know how painful it is to get into your system. The shape of the import endpoint determines the answer.
From Hellenistic grain mills to the Industrial Revolution, the watermill was the largest non-animal source of mechanical power in human civilization for two millennia. Most of what it accomplished is now forgotten because steam replaced it so completely.