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Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 3517 posts
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The Complete Guide to Connection Pools: The Contract a Pooling Mode Makes with Your Application
A look at connection pools through the lens of a contract, based on PostgreSQL 18 and PgBouncer. Covers what the three pooling modes, session, transaction, and statement, each guarantee and each give up; why prepared sta
2026-08-15 · 16 min read #database#postgresql#pgbouncer#connection-pool#operationsThe Complete Guide to SQL Execution Plans: How the Optimizer Chooses a Plan
This piece explains the execution plan from the point of view of the PostgreSQL 18 planner: how statistics are collected, how selectivity is calculated, which constants assemble the cost numbers, when join-order search h
2026-08-15 · 24 min read #database#postgresql#execution-plan#query-optimization#optimizerThe Complete Guide to Database Performance Tuning: Measure Before You Touch a Parameter
Organizes PostgreSQL 18 performance tuning as a diagnostic order rather than a parameter list: profile the workload with pgstatstatements, split the bottleneck by wait event, read the cache and I/O metrics, and only then
2026-08-15 · 17 min read #database#postgresql#performance-tuning#monitoring#operationsThe Complete Guide to Database Caching Strategy: In the End, It's All Invalidation
Working from PostgreSQL 18, this guide builds caching up from the database outward: the cache layers that already exist — sharedbuffers and the OS cache — the computed cache that is a materialized view, the criteria for
2026-08-15 · 24 min read #database#postgresql#caching#performance-tuning#architectureThe Complete Guide to Zero-Downtime Schema Changes: The Lock Level Each DDL Takes and How to Run It Safely
Working from the PostgreSQL 18 documentation, this lays out by grade exactly which lock each DDL statement takes: the eight table lock modes and their conflicts, the lock level of every ALTER TABLE variant, which changes
2026-08-15 · 18 min read #database#postgresql#schema-migration#zero-downtime#lockingThe Complete Guide to PostgreSQL Indexes: The Index Lifecycle from Design to Retirement
This piece treats the PostgreSQL 18 index as an operational asset with a full lifecycle: the design decisions behind column order, the judgment call between six index types, the procedure for building one safely with CON
2026-08-15 · 23 min read #database#postgresql#index#performance-tuning#operationsThe Complete Guide to Data Modeling: From Logical Model to PostgreSQL Physical Schema
Covers the decisions you have to make when translating a logical model into a physical schema on PostgreSQL 18: surrogate keys and identifier types, the grounds for choosing text, numeric, and timestamptz, treating const
2026-08-15 · 19 min read #database#postgresql#data-modeling#schema-design#constraintsThe Complete Guide to Bulk Data Processing: COPY, Chunked Batches, and Reversible Operations
This guide covers how to safely load, update, and delete hundreds of millions of rows in PostgreSQL 18: COPY's options and defaults, the initial-load procedure the documentation recommends, tolerating bad rows with ONERR
2026-08-15 · 24 min read #database#postgresql#batch-processing#data-loading#operationsWriting as an Engineering Skill — What Design Docs, Postmortems, and Review Comments Actually Do
Everyone says writing matters for engineers, and the reason usually collapses into a story about promotion. This piece runs the order differently. Writing is first a device for verifying your own thinking, then a tool fo
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#technical-writing#design-doc#postmortemDesigning Verification — Tests as Grounds for Trust, Not Pass or Fail
A green build tells you nothing on its own. Green acquires meaning only once it is settled what you no longer have to worry about. This piece covers treating tests as grounds for trust rather than as a pass-fail gate: at
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#testing#verification#craftA Sense for Production — What Looks Different After You Have Been Through an Outage
Two people read the same design doc and one of them reads something else entirely: what logs exist when this breaks at three in the morning, how many minutes a rollback takes, and what happens to the data that already la
2026-08-15 · 7 min read #career#skills#sre#production#reliabilityWhat Stays Expensive — Four Things That Gain Value When Generation Gets Cheap
Answer the question "what should engineers prepare for" with a list of tools and the answer is stale in two years. This piece proposes a different axis: the skills that hold value are the ones that stay expensive to veri
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#ai#craft#engineering-cultureWhy Debugging Resists Replacement — The Craft of Elimination
Debugging runs in the opposite direction from writing code. Writing produces one possible thing; debugging erases possible causes until one is left. This piece covers why debugging sits on the expensive-to-verify side, h
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#debugging#craft#troubleshootingReading What Others Wrote — Entering a Codebase and Reverse-Engineering an Undocumented System
Writing gets practiced under compulsion; reading does not. That asymmetry made reading the skill everyone performs daily and nobody trains, and now that generation is cheap it is the capability whose price rose fastest.
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#code-reading#craft#legacy-codeEvidence From Outside the Company — What Works as a Portfolio and What Just Eats Time
The weakness of work done inside a company is that it cannot be verified. It is private, it belongs to a team, and in the end it reaches people only through your own account of it. Work done outside is confirmed with a l
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#side-project#portfolio#open-source#writingWhy Domain Knowledge Is a Defensible Line — The Engineer Who Knows the Business
Domain knowledge is not in the code and usually not in the docs; it lives in people and in organizational habit. That makes it the single largest contributor to the verification cost this series has been tracking, and th
2026-08-15 · 7 min read #career#skills#domain-knowledge#ddd#ontologyThe Manager Track and the IC Track — What Is Reversible and What Actually Grows
Because becoming a manager is habitually called a promotion, the two paths look like the top and bottom of one ladder. What actually differs is the kind of job, and whether an organization treats the two as equals varies
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#management#individual-contributor#career-strategy#decision-makingBeing Visible Inside the Organization — Work Does Not Announce Itself
There is almost always a gap between the work you did and the work that is known. That gap is not a problem of modesty but of how information travels inside an organization. This post explains why good work does not anno
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#visibility#communication#one-on-one#growthHow to Evaluate a Company — Signals of Growth and Signals of Stall
Most people evaluate companies in reverse order: brand, then compensation, then stack, and only afterwards the problems and people that actually build the engineer they will be in three years. This post separates the sig
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#job-search#interview#decision-making#company-cultureNegotiating When You Feel You Have No Leverage — What Is Actually on the Table
What stops most people from negotiating is not missing information but a self-issued verdict that they have no leverage — a verdict produced by defining leverage narrowly as one competing offer. This post locates where l
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#negotiation#offer#communication#decision-making