Blog

A list CRDT has one job — converge — so you can brute-force it: 400 operation logs, every one of the 720 delivery orders each, diff the results. Three orderings broke the naive implementation in three different ways, and one of them left every replica in perfect agreement about a scrambled document.

A measured walk through the hash ring: how much of your cache modulo hashing really destroys, how many virtual nodes you actually need for even distribution, and the 32-bit collision bug that makes the textbook implementation return unroutable keys.

"Our database is highly available" means four different things, and they protect against four different failures. A ladder for forcing that conversation to be specific — plus why the money most teams spend on availability goes to the failure modes they face least.

Kafka is a distributed commit log, not a message queue. Segments on disk, the ISR, the KRaft controller quorum and zero-copy fetches — and how each one explains a config option you've had to set.