Recent content in Posts on Nikita Lapkov
I manage my legally obtained content using a media server. Over the years, both hardware and software on the server went through a bunch of transformations which I find interesting. 
 In order to not look at ads on my Samsung TV, I view all of my content through NVIDIA Shield. It is connected to the TV through HDMI and has a working implementation of HDMI eARC that my TV responds to. Because…
Over the course of my career, I introduced a couple of engineers into the topic of query engines. Every time, I bumped into the same problem: query engines are extremely academic. Despite the fact that industry has over 40 years of expertise, reading foundational papers and then sort of just googling around is the only way to dive deep. Database courses and seminars from Andy Pavlo definitely…
This site has buttons now! Here, try to click it: 
 Click me! 
 I added buttons that act as a simple counter with a name attached. These are good for polls too! 
 Pineapple on pizza: Yay Nay 
 Of course, the results will be biased because there is no deduplication. I don’t limit the number of clicks at all. If you really want to express your view on the pineapple pizza or…
Imagine we have a list of paths to Parquet files on R2. We need to fetch Parquet footer of each file. However, we don’t know in advance whether we will need footers of all files and we want to avoid fetching extra. 
 Rust has a streams abstraction. It is kind of like an iterator, but with async operations permitted. Like iterators, streams are lazy - they don’t do anything unless…
I really like RTS games. I pretty much grew up on them, starting with Command&Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath, moving on to StarCraft 2 trilogy and witnessing the downfall of Command&Conquer 4. 
 I never had the disks for any other RTS games during my teenage years. Yes, the disks, the ones you go to the store to buy! I didn’t know Steam existed back then, so this was my only source of…
Whether we like it or not, email is widely used to identify a person. Code sent to email is used as authentication and sometimes as authorisation for certain actions. I’m not comfortable with Google having such power over me, especially given the fact that they practically don’t have any support you can appeal to. If your Google account is blocked, that’s it. Maybe you know…
I had the chance to speak at RustLab 2024! I will be honest, this was the point I realised that 4 conferences in one year was a bad idea. I was exhausted and overwhelmed, but I still had a blast meeting new people and answering the questions after the talk. It had the following abstract: 
 
 Rhino: Low-latency Key-value Database in Rust 
 Rhino is a key-value database optimised for…
I had the pleasure to speak at EuroRust this year! This was my third and final talk about elfo , an actor system written in Rust. As I’m no longer an active contributor to elfo, it feels a bit bittersweet to finish last thing related to the project. I wish maintainers of elfo well as they continue to push one of the most hard-core Rust code I’ve ever seen :) 
 The talk had the…
This year, I was invited to speak at P99 Conf. The format of a virtual conference was new to me, but hats off to the organisers as it went very smooth for me. I presented a talk with the following abstract: 
 
 Low-Latency Mesh Services Using Actors 
 We’re transforming elfo, our Rust actor system, into a distributed mesh of services. Learn how we tackled message serialization,…
Holy shit, what a year that was. It was absolutely bonkers overwhelming. A lot of interesting stuff happened, but at the same time I took on so much more than I could handle. 
 Conferences 
 




 
 
 Speaking at RustLab 2024 
 
 During late 2023 and early 2024 I applied to a bunch of conferences. Previously, I didn’t have any luck of becoming a…
A month ago I received an email from the organisers of Rust Nation UK 2024 inviting me to speak at the conference. One of the speakers got COVID and I was chosen to be their replacement. I had less than 48 hours to prepare the slides, which was a fun challenge, but very stressful! The final result was a talk about my work on elfo with the following abstract: 
 
 Type-safe and…

 Discussion on HackerNews and Lobsters . 
 
 Roughly a year ago I moved into my new apartment. One of the reasons I picked this apartment was age of the building. The construction was finished in 2015, which ensured pretty good thermal isolation for winters as well as small nice things like Ethernet ports in each room. However, there was one part of my apartment that was too new and…
A couple of months ago I gave a talk “SQL’s Inner Workings” at Handmade Seattle 2023 conference with the following abstract: 
 
 An exposé by a whistleblower investigating the marketing claims of “It’s just the same old SQL you know.” 
 Most databases nowadays provide an SQL interface to query your data. After all, if one knows SQL, they can easily write queries to…





 
 
 Discussion on HackerNews and Lobsters . 
 
 MongoDB has recently released a new query engine coming in version 7.0. I was one of the people working on this engine during my 2 years in MongoDB and I would like to share some technical details about it. 
 Disclaimer: Prior to writing this article, I have contacted my ex-colleagues at MongoDB to ensure…

 Discussion on HackerNews and Lobsters . 
 
 Over the course of one year this website is deployed, I did not pay a penny for hosting it. Sure, I pay for renting the domain itself, but everything else is free and quite honestly I like it this way. So when I woke up to a 10$ bill from DigitalOcean, I immediately knew something was amiss. 
 Orange Website 
 Last month I wrote an…





 
 
 Discussion on HackerNews and Lobsters . 
 
 A while ago I was thinking about making something nice for my wife as a present for the Valentine’s Day. My eye caught a rather cool-looking 7-color eInk display with Raspberry Pico W on board - Pimoroni Inky Frame . From the first glance it looked quite polished with ready-to-use SDKs in Python and…





 
 
 Discussion on HackerNews and Lobsters . 
 
 I have been writing C++ professionally for the last 4 years and 3 months ago I started a new job in Rust. I would like to share my experience and thoughts on the transition between 2 languages. 
 Disclaimer: This article is not a C++ vs Rust comparison. I will talk about my personal experience and things…





 
 Disclaimer: When reading this post, please keep in mind that you are likely to come from a very different cultural background than me. Russians approach life in their own way and some things might seem strange. Still, this was my path and I would like to share it. 
 My name is Nikita, I am 23 years old Software Engineer working on query execution at MongoDB. I…





 
 
 Feel free to join the discussion on HackerNews . 
 
 In the early 2020 I was working in the Distributed Queries team of YDB. YDB is a Distributed SQL Database that combines high availability and scalability with strong consistency and ACID transactions. One of my key tasks there was to develop new storage format for JSON data. YDB recently became open…





 
 
 Feel free to join the discussion on HackerNews . 
 
 Compilers always seemed a little bit like magic to me. You write the code in some language and then it spits out bitcode that a small crystall inside your computer understands. 
 Some databases ship with a specialized compiler inside them. This compiler can generate assembly code for parts of the…





 
 
 This article was originally posted on dev.to , but it turns out that HackerNews banned this website, so I decided to create my own. 
 
 
 Feel free to join the discussion on HackerNews . 
 
 Lego of the database world 
 It is quite common for a distributed database to have the following components: 
 
 
 Distributed Storage…