System Architecture

Orchestrating Media Workflows Through Strategic Collaboration

The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy-preserving by design. I mean, unless some administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built-in...

Reading a book about bowling is not the same as actually bowling. If that resonates with you and you want to learn more about large language models, check out the LLM From Scratch project. The hand…

Distributed tracing explained with concrete debugging scenarios: slow requests, deploy regressions, environment errors, user-specific bugs, and cache misses.

Announcing AccountQueues: per-user, per-key queue isolation, provider flow control headers, and why 2 RPS default protects the internet.

What happens when you stop managing retries and start shipping features. Scale requests, not pods.

EZThrottle is a multi-region HTTP proxy for external APIs. Race requests across regions, survive partial outages automatically.

Move the layout decision out of the clients and into the API. One JSON contract; every client renders it in its own programming language or framework.

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.

Build caching is becoming an everyone problem. Here is how we think about productizing it at Tuist for indie developers and small teams, not just enterprises.

Working Backwards PR/FAQ Instructions & Template Working Backwards PR/FAQ Instructions & Template Start with the customer and work backwards—harder than it sounds but a clear path to innovating and delighting customers—a useful working backwards tool: writing the press release and FAQ before you build the product. Introduction Most of Amazon’s major products and initiatives since […]

You should too

An interactive exploration of how GPS works — from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.

A deeper dive into why shell scripts cannot replace a proper CI control plane, drawn from years of building and operating CI systems at scale.

Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and time-trigger scheduling on SQLite. One file, zero servers.

Learn how Linux containers are built from the ground up. Starting with the mount namespace and a root filesystem, see why PID, cgroup, UTS, and network namespaces naturally follow - and how this foundation makes concepts like bind mounts, volumes, and persistence in Docker or Kubernetes much easier to grasp.

A short HOW TO guide for agent memory systems. Especially the difference between blocks, files and skills.

FreeBSD loader (Forth, ZFS-aware Boot Environments), LILO (block lists, 1992-2015), GRUB 2 (filesystem drivers for everything). Three loaders, three theories of the operating system.

Jason Rodriguez is an interesting mix of marketer, designer, developer, and operations pro based in Michigan. Working at GitHub.

Posted on Saturday 18 Apr 2026. 1,331 words, 11 links. By Matt Webb.

Over the past decade, Clos-based leaf-spine architectures have become the default design for data center networking. They deliver predictable latency, horizontal scalability, and clean integration …

Phil Gervasi wrote an interesting article describing Rail-Optimized Networking for AI Training Workloads. Go read it first; I’ll wait. Does it sound interesting? Were you able to see behind the curtain and figure out what it’s really about?

Express 65 packages. Next.js 644. XZ 2.5 years of social engineering, caught by 500 ms of SSH latency. The audit duty has been outsourced so many times that nobody is holding it.

AI made code free. Coordination is the bottleneck now. The distributed-systems toolkit — partition, shard, shared-nothing — turns out to describe the next decade of org design.

GUIs are dead—at least for most user experiences. This post describes a BYU capstone project where five seniors built a conversational interface for Manifold using MCP and picos. The result shows how natural language can replace a GUI entirely, letting users create, tag, and manage digital things through dialogue instead of learning a standard graphical user interface.