The "Files are the Database": A Deep Dive into Delta Lake
How a simple transaction log turned cloud object storage into a reliable data warehouse — and the trade-offs between file-based lakehouse and traditional database architectures.
2025
An AI Was Tricked Into Hacking
Analyzing the GTG-1002 cyber-espionage campaign where attackers tricked an AI into autonomous hacking — and what it reveals about the 'Confused Deputy' problem in AI agent architecture.
OpenAI's Browser - Architectural Trade-offs
A deep dive into the Atlas browser's split architecture: why OpenAI separated the UI from Chromium, and the performance, security, and maintenance trade-offs involved.
The Spanner Paper: Google's Quest for a Globally Consistent Database
How Google built a globally consistent database by trading milliseconds of latency for mathematical correctness, using atomic clocks and clever transaction protocols.
Deconstructing Bigtable: A Study in Distributed System Design
An analysis of Google's Bigtable paper and the deliberate trade-offs that made it scale: sacrificing SQL for flexibility, trading consistency for performance, and choosing simplicity over features.
Tectonic: Navigating Design Trade-offs at Facebook Scale
How Facebook unified its storage infrastructure by accepting bounded inefficiency to achieve adaptability and reliability at exabyte scale.
Engineering Trade-offs in the Google File System
Breaking down the engineering trade-offs in Google's foundational distributed file system: reliability vs. cost, latency vs. throughput, and simplicity vs. availability.
A Baby, a Bug, and a Pull Request to the Human Genome
Understanding CRISPR through the lens of software: how doctors shipped a personalized bug fix to a baby's genome using molecular find-and-replace.
Beyond kubectl apply: Giving Your Kubernetes Apps Superpowers with the Operator Pattern
How to extend Kubernetes with the Operator pattern: encoding operational expertise into custom controllers that manage complex applications as first-class resources.
Debugging Pip Extras: A Deep Dive into .whl Files
A debugging journey into Python wheel files: why pip couldn't find an 'extra' that was clearly defined in setup.py, and how to inspect .whl metadata.