Daily learnings and observations from building software systems. A quiet corner for backend engineering, distributed systems, and CS.
The most annoying bug class in a typical web app isn’t in the backend or the frontend, it’s in the gap between them. The backend renames a field, the frontend keeps sending the old one, and nothing fails until runtime. JSON is the world’s…
A modern CPU has a private L1 and L2 cache per core. Which raises an awkward question nobody asks until concurrency bites them: if core 0 and core 1 both have a copy of the same memory in their private caches, and core 0 writes to it… what…
Most mainstream frontend frameworks are built on the same bet: describing the entire UI from scratch on every state change is a nice programming model, and we can make it fast enough with a virtual DOM and a diffing algorithm. React made that…
Back in November I wrote a very basic overview of the Go garbage collector and promised a more technical article once I had properly read the official Go GC Guide. I finally did, so here it is. The goal of this article is to understand what…
Most of us spend our days inside an operating system without really thinking about it. We open a browser, run Vim or IntelliJ, ssh into a server, maybe spin up a VM or a container and it all just works. But under all of that, there’s a piece…