Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 2: In-Memory Store (Written in collaboration with @scylladb.com) This week, we explore the foundations of LSM trees: memtable and SSTables. read.thecoder.cafe/p/build-your...

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." [New post] Nothing Beats Kindness: Celebrating World Kindness Day 🎉 read.thecoder.cafe/p/nothing-be...

Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 1: In-Memory Store The beginning of the series written in collaboration with @scylladb.com where we explore key-value storage engines. This week, we start with a simple in-memory storage and the validation client. read.thecoder.cafe/p/build-your...

🎃 Horror Coding Stories: Therac-25—A deadly race condition and overflow read.thecoder.cafe/p/therac-25

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/f...

[New post] Speed vs. Velocity: The Difference Between Moving Fast and Moving Forward read.thecoder.cafe/p/speed-vs-v...

At long last, @chris.blue and I have submitted the final manuscript of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, second edition, to the publisher. There is always more that could be improved but at some point we just have to call it done. Now it goes into production; probably shipping in ~4 months.

I just got my 🇬🇧 visa.

[New post] Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs): Convergence Without Coordination read.thecoder.cafe/p/crdt

I created a new root website for thecoder.cafe and moved the newsletter to read.thecoder.cafe. Thanks to @Cloudflare, which enabled a smooth transition.

I vibe code the same way I play: saving my progress every 15 seconds.

P99 CONF is next week! Which talks are on your "can't miss" list?

Agentic Design Patterns docs.google.com/document/d/1...

The Story of The Coder Cafe: Celebrating the First Year This is my story behind the creation of a tech newsletter: the process, the ideas, the struggles, etc. www.thecoder.cafe/p/the-coder-...

Today marks the birthday of my newsletter 🥳! It turns out that I wrote quite a bit during the year, so I decided to compile all the posts and release them as a book (260 pages). The book is available on Leanpub: DRM-free EPUB/PDF. Get the book: leanpub.com/thecodercafe... RT appreciated 🙏.

I re-enabled my Calendly session: calendly.com/teiva-harsan... If you want to chat about tech, non-tech topics, whatever, feel free to book a slot!

📢 New post: Organic Growth vs. Controlled Growth What Kind of Garden Is Your Codebase? www.thecoder.cafe/p/organic-gr...

TIL: The RUM Conjecture In short, the conjecture says that any access method faces a 3-way trade-off among read overhead, update overhead, and memory/space overhead and you can optimize at most two.

My notes on the SILK: Preventing Latency Spikes in LSM Key-Value Stores whitepaper. substack.com/@teivah/note...

Sort Lines in Source Code testing.googleblog.com/2025/09/sort...

What Makes System Calls Expensive: A Linux Internals Deep Dive. blog.codingconfessions.com/p/what-makes... Another great post by @abhi9u.bsky.social. I learned a lot, including vDSO.

📢 New post What I Learned During My Paternity Leave Books, Code, and Fatherhood www.thecoder.cafe/p/paternity-...

I've updated one of my top posts with additional examples from Gmail and Instagram. Latency and User Experience www.thecoder.cafe/p/latency-an...

Writing Code Is Easy. Reading It Isn’t. idiallo.com/blog/writing...

The Coder Cafe is a top 100 rising Substack in Technology. substack.com/leaderboard/... 👉 thecoder.cafe

wal3: A Write-Ahead Log for Chroma, Built on Object Storage trychroma.com/engineering/...

Second Brain: A System to Capture, Organize, and Reuse Everything You Learn www.thecoder.cafe/p/second-brain

The Story Of Strongly Happens Before I’m still learning C++ so I was far from understanding everything but this post was awesome anyway. nekrozqliphort.github.io/posts/happen...

%CPU Utilization Is a Lie Observing the impact of hyperthreading during stress tests. www.brendanlong.com/cpu-utilizat...

Replacing a cache service with a database avi.im/blag/2025/db...

AI Models Need a Virtual Machine blog.sigplan.org/2025/08/29/a...

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work www.seangoedecke.com/the-simplest...

How to slow down a program? And why it can be useful stefan-marr.de/2025/08/how-...

🧵 After 10 months, here are the top 5 posts from my newsletter, The Coder Cafe.

Das Problem mit German Strings And why I don't want my database to choose the best encoding for me (yet) www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...

Availability Models: Because “Highly Available” Isn’t Saying Much www.thecoder.cafe/p/availabili...

Read that f*cking code! etsd.tech/posts/rtfc/

Why I Switched to Vim Keybindings www.thecoder.cafe/p/vim-keybin...

All I really want is to spend my life learning new things and sharing them with others.

What Makes Code Beautiful: The Beauty of Average Code www.thecoder.cafe/p/what-makes...

A better way to think about dependencies for more reliable systems Soft vs. Hard Dependency www.thecoder.cafe/p/soft-hard-...

Duplication Is Not the Enemy by @terriblesoftware.org terriblesoftware.org/2025/05/28/d... An amazing post on the concepts of duplication and abstraction.

Research suggests that reflecting on errors is one of the most effective ways to reinforce learning. Keeping a Mistake Journal www.thecoder.cafe/p/mistake-jo...

The Hidden Cost of Skipping the Fundamentals in the Age of AI codingismycraft.blog/index.php/20...

[New post] Property-Based Testing: Moving Beyond Traditional Tests "Traditional tests don’t guarantee a bug-free system; a passing test only confirms that the tested scenario behaves as expected." www.thecoder.cafe/p/property-b...

🎉 The Coder Cafe just hit 2,000 subscribers! thecoder.cafe I'm very pleased with the growth and support, thank you all. Also, this week, the newsletter was recommended by @pragmaticengineer.com newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/recommendati... Truly incredible...

A leap year check in three instructions hueffner.de/falk/blog/a-...

That’s the 3rd time in my last 8 posts on thecoder.cafe that one made it to Hacker News front page. 🧵 A thread on how I did it.

Writing bad alerts

Don’t Forget About Your Mental Health www.thecoder.cafe/p/mental-hea...