Topic
#systems
3 posts
databases
7 min read
#06
TigerBeetle Would Rather Crash Than Guess
Two asserts buried in a financial database. One panics if your hardware lies about time. The other panics if you allocate memory after startup. Together, they're the whole philosophy.
systems
6 min read
#02
How nginx Tells Time Without Asking
A lock-free time cache lets millions of nginx requests read the current time without waiting for each other. 64 pre-allocated slots, a memory barrier, and a bet that your thread won't sleep for a full minute.
systems
5 min read
#00
The Bool That Holds Go's Ecosystem Hostage
A single boolean in Go's source code, if flipped from false to true, would instantly break thousands of packages. The Go team put it there on purpose.