Stage 1 - Systems Programming Foundations Subject area 1.1 - What Systems Programming Means Article 3 The short version Resource ownership answers a simple but important question: Who is res...

Stage 1 - Systems Programming Foundations Subject area 1.1 - What Systems Programming Means Article 2 The short version Every system spends resources to do work. The four resources that appear i...

Stage 1 - Systems Programming Foundations Subject area 1.1 - What Systems Programming Means Article 1 The short version Systems programming is the work of building software that manages or direc...

Introduction There is a moment in programming that nobody warns you about properly. You know the language. You know the database. You know the framework. You can write handlers, queries, goroutin...

1. What TCP Actually Is, and Why It Exists Start with the network underneath TCP, because that’s the whole reason TCP exists. The internet moves data in packets, and the protocol that handles that...

Why Migrations Break A migration that runs in 200ms on your local machine takes 30 minutes on the production table with 50 million rows. During those 30 minutes, your ALTER TABLE holds a lock that...

Why Caching Exists A single database query takes 5ms. A cache lookup takes 1ms. The difference seems small — but at 10,000 requests per second, that 4ms gap is 40 seconds of cumulative latency per...

Where We Are Post 1 built the WAL — every write is fsynced to disk before being acknowledged. Post 2 built the memtable — an in-memory skip list that keeps keys sorted and serves reads in O(log n)...

Where We Are In Part 1 we built a Write-Ahead Log. Every mutation — write or delete — is recorded to disk and fsynced before we acknowledge it to the caller. We have durability. What we do not ha...

Implementing a Write-Ahead Log in Go A Write-Ahead Log is the mechanism behind the D in ACID. Before any mutation reaches your data files, a record describing that mutation is written and fsynced ...