OSWALD—Object Storage Write-Ahead Log Device
OSWALD is a Write-Ahead Log (WAL) design built exclusively on object storage primitives. It works with any object storage service that…
Nicolae Vartolomei
a website by Nicolae Vartolomei
Latest posts
Time to Wow!
Time to Wow! (TtW) measures the time it takes for a customer to experience their first emotional “Wow” moment with your product or service…
C++ Code Hygiene
Template Specialization Boundaries: Your Rights End Where Mine Begin Template specializations should reside in the same header file that…
External Sorting
Recently, I needed to implement an external sorting algorithm that would work well on "modern" hardware (lots of CPU cores, fast NVMe…
How to Organise and Run a Platform Engineering Team for Success
I joined the platform team at Cloudflare and later led the effort to build a dedicated team for a multi-petabyte data platform. The platform…
Applying Universal Scalability Law to an individual's productivity
Hypothesis : USL applies equally well to an individual's productivity as it does software systems, hardware systems or groups of people. As…
On-demand, cost-efficient remote development environments, nowdev
I often need Linux machines with higher performance capabilities than the virtual machines that can be run on my personal computer in order…
Fixing ext4 IO distribution on RAID 0 arrays
A while ago I ran into a weird performance issue with a database . The setup was pretty standard - ext4 file system running on a RAID…
A mnemonic for Little's law
Today, I was working on a problem where I struggled to recall formula for the famous Little's law at 6am. My laziness made me open the…
Zipf's law and sharding
You are an online business with some millions of customers. Customers are sending events to your business. You process and store these…
Bookshelf
A selection of books that stand out, and that had a formative impact on me. Listed in no particular order. If you have recommendations for…
Rebalancing data in shared-nothing distributed systems
This note describes the need for moving data between nodes of a distributed system, the challenges arising in the process, and a particular…
The critical drunk-shit-talk region
Today I'll try to explain why drunk fights are observed more often in some cultures than others. First, we identify and define two drinking…
Debugging programs running inside Docker containers, in production
Tools like strace , perf , gdb are part of the usual debugging toolbox on Linux. These are used to inspect behaviour of newly launched…
Weighted Deterministic Aperture
Weighted Deterministic Aperture is my contribution to Deterministic Aperture algorithm to support work distribution proportional to server…
A model for choosing the number of shards and replicas for optimal efficiency
In the design of large scale systems, hardware cost plays an important role. Especially in the era of big data and an ever-increasing amount…
Cyanide
Each no you tell yourself is a cyanide drop. A drop that circulates through the cardiovascular system affecting your heart at first, and…
Distributed Systems Classics
A selected list of timeless and influential papers in distributed systems that shaped the research in the field. Intended to serve as a good…
Omniverse—An Operating System for thought
This note aims to describe the note-taking tool I'm using. It will take a while until it is coherent. Left side : graph of term/tags…
Error handling and control flow (in JavaScript)
These are the slides I have presented at a JSMD meetup. This happened shortly after joining Retently , where my focus was building a…
Do the Work
You can be proud of yourself. You’ve done something that millions talk about but only a handful actually perform. And if you can do it once…
8 Qualities of a Great Manager by Parasad Setty
HR meets science at Google with Prasad Setty presents the following list: Be a good coach. Empower the team and do not micromanage. Express…