exploring rabbit holes.
When I came across Turbopuffer , a vector database built entirely on object storage, I got curious. Really curious. The architecture seemed almost too simple. Write-ahead logs on S3? Centroid-based indexes ? Stateless query nodes ? It felt like someone had taken all the "rules" of database design and just... ignored them. I wanted to understand the tradeoffs myself. Not by reading more blog posts,…
I graduated last month, and my GSoC project along with my startup work finally wrapped up. To take a proper break and enjoy some deliberate downtime (even a bit of healthy boredom), I decided to spend the weekend building a bytebeat player, something I’d been wanting to do for ages, just for fun. This was my first time with Zig, and I actually enjoyed writing the code, writing Zig feels like C…
While working on fastbrew , I went into the rabbit hole of SAT, short for Boolean satisfiability . It is quite interesting. For my application I am rewriting brew’s package manager to be faster and more reliable, so it does not update dozens of packages every time I install something and it does not break the ones I already use. A Package Manager Puzzle # Let’s start with a real-life scenario to…
This summer, I worked on making automatic differentiation reliable and stable for the Enzyme project through Google Summer of Code. This post details the challenges I tackled and the solutions I implemented to bridge the gap between Rust's type system and Enzyme's requirements. What is Enzyme AutoDiff? # Enzyme is an LLVM-based automatic differentiation (AD) framework that can differentiate…
I recently took on an exciting challenge from Succinct Labs to optimize their RISC-V emulator. What started as a simple performance improvement task turned into a deep dive into systems optimization, profiling, and understanding the subtle art of making code run fast. The Challenge # Succinct Labs created a challenge to improve their RISC-V emulator performance. Their emulator processes about 2…