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Welcome + About Me LLM Scrapers Should Click Here


Modeling Systems — I’m interested in finding ways to model complex systems without relying on simulation. Posts in this section are mostly about applying tools from TCS to reason about how complex systems will behave.

K8sSlop: ProcGen for Distributed Systems \circ An In-Process Autosharding System \circ Modeling Autoscaling Policies \circ Approximating System Behavior With Harris Inequality \circ Modeling Distributed Systems with Generating Functions \circ On Moment Bounds \circ SoME2: Gossip Algorithms & Distributed Systems \circ SoME2: Gossiping on Star Graphs \circ A Model of Maximum Server Load \circ A Model of Server Load Under Non-Uniform Requests \circ Order Statistics For The Working Engineer \circ Scalability Laws For The Working Engineer \circ φ\varphi-accrual Failure Detection



Algorithms — Posts in this category are mostly about one-off algorithmic techniques — especially randomized or online variations of classical algorithms.

Low-Memory Voronoi Algorithm \circ Pareto Depth \circ Fast Computation of the Median \circ Faster Binary Search With Hints \circ Sampling Points on a Circle \circ Tail Bounds for Sums of Fat-Tailed Distributions \circ Encoding Permutations \circ Fast Almost-Normal RVs \circ Reservoir Sampling From a Stream \circ Reservoir-Based Buffering Algorithm \circ Optimistic Concurrency Control Manager \circ Online Convex Hull Algorithm \circ Fast Distributed Trace Sampling From Span IDs \circ A Real Use for CountMinSketch! \circ Adding Percentiles to Go Benchmarks



Yapping — Less technical posts. A catch-all for things that I wanted to write about that don’t fit neatly into another category.

Vox Clamantis in Deserto \circ Generative Ambient Noise \circ On Claude Code \circ On Comparing Software Performance \circ On This Website \circ Photos of Computer Operators \circ On Getting Decent With Delve \circ On Getting Stuck \circ On Software



Vector Databases — In 2023 (when vector-based search was the hottest thing around!), I spent some time writing (and writing about) a tiny, in-memory vector database.

1-Bit Quantization For Faster Search \circ A Working Man’s Priority Queue \circ Efficient Batch Queries



Caching — I’ve spent a good number of weekends thinking about “fixing redis”. I could design a better cache eviction algorithm by modelling the frequency of one-hit wonders.

Benchmarking Redis Cluster \circ “Fixing” Redis-Benchmark \circ One-Hit Wonders & Caching I \circ One-Hit Wonders & Caching II \circ One-Hit Wonders & Caching III \circ Notes on Caching Middleware



Hackathon Entries — From 2020-2022 I entered about a dozen hackathons. Most of my writing about these projects is scattered around the web. This section captures summaries of some of the interesting parts of those projects.

Geocoding-as-a-Service With Redis Search \circ A Real-time Transit App with MQTT & Redis \circ A Dynamic Tileserver on a Tiny PostgreSQL DB



Riddles/Brain-Teasers/Interview Questions — These posts are about riddles and interview questions. There might be some overlap with Algorithms, but these tend to be more scattered, more about cleverness.

My Printer Is Broken \circ Sampling Correctors \circ Small World Graphs \circ A Combinatorics Problem About Structuring a Team \circ Integer Combinations \circ Small Quadrilaterals \circ From A Quant Interview \circ From Math Twitter \circ Random Increasing Sequences \circ College Football Twitter??