Ahmad Alhour
A notebook on systems internals, the craft of writing software, and the curiosity that pulls me toward both.
Selected Essays
Recent writing
all →- Crash-only confidence, part 1: from random kills to exact boundaries databases
- Making the on-disk state real: Sorted-String Tables (SSTables) databases
- The Memtable: where writes go to wait databases
- The syscall I forgot: directory fsync databases
- Durability is a promise you can't hand-wave: Write-Ahead Log (WAL) databases
Recent talks
all →- The Silent Orchestra: The Hidden Choreography of Distributed Databases Xpand Conf (Amman, Jordan)
- Episode 31: Distributed Systems at Shopify @glitch.stream (Online)
- 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. Or find me on github, twitter, linkedin, mastodon, or via rss.