Engineering notes
Build logs, reading notes, and systems essays.
Long-form notes on internals, tradeoffs, failures, measurements, and the useful edges of building infrastructure from scratch.
Series
4 posts
Building A Storage Engine
LSM trees, WAL records, memtables, SSTables, Bloom filters, compaction, and the road toward a serious database core.
3 posts
Redis Internals
Event loops, profiling, protocol details, and the parts of a Redis clone that turn into systems lessons.
1 post
Kafka From The Log Up
Append-only logs, segments, offsets, consumer progress, and the storage contract behind streaming infrastructure.
Topics
All notes
Jul 8, 2026 / 6 min read
Building Broadsheet, a Rust Animation Engine for Systems Explainers
How I built a deterministic Rust animation engine with stateless timelines, camera-aware rendering, newspaper styling, and ffmpeg export.
Jun 20, 2026 / 9 min read
I Built LSM Trees for a Storage Engine
The first notes from building a Rust storage engine: WAL records, skip-list memtables, immutable memtables, SSTable files, block indexes, tombstones, and Bloom filters.
Jun 14, 2026 / 6 min read
Building grep in Rust Taught Me to Think in State Machines
Notes from building a grep clone with a custom regex engine: tokenization, Shunting Yard, Thompson-style NFAs, epsilon transitions, and line-by-line matching.
Jun 10, 2026 / 8 min read
System Design Chapter 1 Notes: How Web Systems Start Scaling
Notes from the first chapter of System Design Interview, covering load balancers, replication, caching, CDNs, sharding, denormalization, sticky sessions, and operational automation.
Jun 6, 2026 / 6 min read
Building a Redis Clone in Rust, Then Making It 49x Faster With Profiling
Benchmarking a Redis-compatible Rust server against Redis, profiling the slow paths, and using indexes to remove pathological scans.
Jun 1, 2026 / 8 min read
Concurrent Servers: Notes on Threads, Event Loops, libuv, Redis, and async/await
A series-level writeup from Eli Bendersky's concurrent servers articles, tracing the design space from sequential sockets to threads, event-driven I/O, libuv, Redis, and async/await.
May 20, 2026 / 1 min read
Redis Internals: The Event Loop as a Systems Primitive
A concise walkthrough of how Redis uses a single-threaded event loop, multiplexed I/O, and careful data structure choices to stay predictable under load.
May 13, 2026 / 1 min read
Kafka Architecture Notes: Logs, Segments, and Consumer Lag
Engineering notes on Kafka's log-oriented architecture, segment lifecycle, replication, and why consumer lag is an operational signal rather than just a metric.
May 2, 2026 / 1 min read
eBPF Tracing Notes for Runtime Latency
A practical outline for using eBPF to observe syscall latency, scheduler pressure, and runtime behavior with minimal application changes.