Writings
Essays and notes on software, systems, books, philosophy, and the useful trouble in between.
2026
6 essaysCrash-only confidence, part 1: from random kills to exact boundaries
A crash test that cannot explain itself is mostly theater.
Making the on-disk state real: Sorted-String Tables (SSTables)
Files are easy; files you can trust, inspect, and recover from are the real step.
The Memtable: where writes go to wait
Before the disk gets involved, memory has to learn the rules.
The syscall I forgot: directory fsync
Sometimes the missing durability bug is one directory above where you were looking.
Durability is a promise you can't hand-wave: Write-Ahead Log (WAL)
Once bytes leave your process, the comforting story gets complicated.
Building BeachDB: A Database from Scratch (in Go)
The fastest way past hand-waving is to make the machine answer back.
2025
1 essayOn Watershed Moments: Boredom, Growth, and Curiosity
A personal essay about boredom, growth, layoffs, and using watershed moments to choose the next career direction deliberately.
2018
3 essaysOn Stoicism: 40 lessons I learned in 2017, Part 2
More notes on steadiness, judgment, adversity, and the work that stays yours.
On Stoicism: 40 lessons I learned in 2017, Part 1
Notes on control, attention, action, and making philosophy practical.
Summary of My 2017 Readings
The books, themes, and margins that shaped a year of reading.
2016
2 essaysnand2tetris, or Building a Computer from First Principles
Going from a single NAND gate to a working computer over twelve weeks — what the nand2tetris course actually teaches you.
A Queryable List for Python: Proof of Concept
What I missed from LINQ, and a small experiment in bringing query-shaped thinking to Python lists.
2015
2 essaysImplementing Data Structures and Algorithms in C#
Working through MIT's algorithms course by building an open-source C# library of the data structures it covers.
Hello, World!
A public notebook for learning in the open — software systems, databases, books, and the occasional reflective detour.