I was recently reading the paper: What Modern NVME Storage Can Do, And How to Exploit it. It provides a good overview of the state of current storage engines in different databases, and talks about linux I/O API options, trends in hardware, and how to leverage the full power of SSDs. It’s a familiar story: just like in the previous post we couldn’t saturate main memory bandwidth, here we aren’t able to saturate disk bandwidth.

TLDR You have a bottleneck in your system, you run top and see your system’s process taking 100% CPU. You then run top -H and see there’s this one thread keeping 1 CPU core totally busy. You run perf and get a flamegraph, you see some hot functions, you optimize them and you get slightly better performance - enough that your system can survive for a few more months and your customers are happy (for now).

I recently decided to leave Meta (called Facebook when I joined). Today is my last day. I have finished offboarding and spoken to a lot of colleagues, some of who have become close friends now. As I sit in the MPK17 coffee shop, I figured it’s a good time to reflect back on my time in the company as things are still fresh in my mind. First of all, I am really proud of what my team and I achieved: we built a 0->1 streaming system that is powering use-cases like fleet wide distribution (across Meta’s data centers in all regions), control plane data indexing, etc.

Intro Logic is something that comes up again and again – not only in daily life, but on the job as well. That’s because logic, by definition, is a language you can use to reason about stuff. And you reason about stuff everywhere: picking your favorite drink in a coffee shop, negotiating your internet bill with your ISP, reasoning about the behavior of an engineering system, etc. Logic is one of the super powers that up-levels you as a human.

Intro How is our data safe when a lot of it lives in the “cloud”, which is a set of machines we don’t have direct control over. Surely, there must be a way that our data is kept secure so that bad actors don’t have access to it, or it’s in a form that is useless to them even if they get their hand on it. So in this post, let’s discuss security.