Engineering
Write-ups from systems I have built and run in production, including the parts that broke. They are written for engineers and go deep into the details.
Founders do not need to read these to work with me, but they show how I think about reliability and cost when the stakes are real.
See the projects behind these notes →3 notes
Elasticsearch in Production Is Not a YouTube Tutorial
Every YouTube tutorial makes Elasticsearch look easy. Then you run it in production. A node pegged its CPU and stopped answering queries, holding just 4.2 GB at 39% heap. It hadn't failed. The setup around it had: a schema never shaped for its queries, and storage that was never bounded. Here's what the tutorials leave out.
One Million CCTV Events a Day in a 512 MB Container
A million camera events a day is only twelve a second. The real work is keeping one fragile NVR stream alive on the smallest container on a shared box. Why Go and the actor model fit the shape of the problem.
Work-Stealing from First Principles
Tokio, Go, and Java's ForkJoinPool all use work-stealing. I learned the algorithm by implementing the Chase-Lev variant from scratch in Rust, building up from load distribution to per-worker deques, CAS, and memory ordering.
Not sure what to build or how to build it?
That's exactly what the advisory session is for.
Book an Advisory Session