Ahmad Alhour

A notebook on systems internals, the craft of writing software, and the curiosity that pulls me toward both.

Selected essays

7 Jan 2026 Building BeachDB: A Database from Scratch (in Go)
21 Dec 2025 On Watershed Moments: Boredom, Growth, and Curiosity

Recent writing

All writing →

24 Apr 2026 Crash-only confidence, part 1: from random kills to exact boundaries
6 Apr 2026 Making the on-disk state real: Sorted-String Tables (SSTables)
22 Feb 2026 The Memtable: where writes go to wait
16 Feb 2026 The syscall I forgot: directory fsync
12 Feb 2026 Durability is a promise you can't hand-wave: Write-Ahead Log (WAL)

Recent talks

All talks →

Oct 2025 The Silent Orchestra: The Hidden Choreography of Distributed Databases Xpand Conf (Amman, Jordan)
Dec 2023 Episode 31: Distributed Systems at Shopify @glitch.stream (Online)
Jan 2020 What do we talk about when we talk about Big Data? KI labs (Munich, Germany)

More wandering: animations of the data structures and syscalls behind the writing, projects I've built or contributed to over the years, and the long version of who I am on the about page.

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