Open To Work dustin dot wilson dot 2151 at gmail dot com What I’ve Been Up to On My Time Off
👋🏽 Hello. My name is Dustin. I’m a software engineer from New York,
New York. I use this website mostly to write about databases,
distributed systems, and algorithmic tricks. I’ve listed a few
highlights below, but you can see a full list of posts here.
I was most recently working on the Mimir team at Grafana Labs. Before that, I worked on DBaaS (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, and Kafka) at DigitalOcean. Before that, I was applying microeconomic theory to litigation and regulatory matters at NERA.
An In-Process Autosharding System — I recently read about Databricks’ auto-sharding system. This post is about a lightweight algorithm I developed that enables auto-sharding without a dedicated coordinator service.
Modeling Systems with Generating Functions — I didn’t want to rely on simulation when trying to model the behavior of distributed systems. I wrote a library that uses generating functions to model the distribution of execution times instead.
A Reservoir-Based Buffering Algorithm — I wrote a buffering algorithm that uses fixed memory and keeps a random, uniform sample of messages during an outage of arbitrary length.
Spreading Rumors on The Internet — I entered 3Blue1Brown’s Summer of Math Exposition and wrote about some of the properties of gossip and broadcast algorithms.
A Concurrency Control Manager — I read Optimistic Methods for Concurrency Control and re-implemented it with my own transaction validation method. The result is a small Go package that can be used to wrap an arbitrary data store and give it OCC semantics.
A Method for Encoding Permutations — Let’s imagine that you wanted to store a permutation. Can you do it in fewer than bits?
Reflections on A Month of Claude Code — You might be interested in how I use AI in my work. I think it’s an important topic. I’ll aim to update this every few months as my relationship with these tools changes.
Some Things I Believe — I did this exercise after seeing Nat Friedman’s site. Here’s a short list of things I believe about software.