It's fun to flip back to 1954 conversations of "automatic programming" - using a compiler to generate machine code based on human-friendly text instead of manually writing it out by hand. www.computerhistory.org/collections/...

It took me almost a decade of living nearby but I finally got a chance to climb and then rappel from the top of Der Kegel today!

they opened a nice cafe at tempelhof 2 minutes from my favorite book shop 😁

Inside you are two wolves

The advent of germ theory, vaccines, sanitation, and antibiotics, in this view, indirectly lead to an increase in social services, and a decrease in capital punishment, murder, slavery, and torture. In effect, it raised the value of human life in human eyes.

Lots of Real Engineer energy out here in Japan, feels good.

I put together a talk for HYTRADBOI 2025 about my favorite technique for building databases or almost anything with high complexity - extreme rewriting!

Six straight days of blue skies and great skiing conditions is a nice way to transition into funemployment 😁

It’s always a bit surreal being back in the old country.

Lately I've been playing around with a new type of LSM storage engine that has some interesting properties. Most LSM implementations split the sst data into blocks. But what if those blocks were stored in a heap instead of a file, and compaction only happened on overlapping blocks? Kinda Bε-like.

After 8.5 years in Germany, I finally earned the right to wear socks and sandals. Citizenship has been a goal for a long time- I’ve had to line up at 4am and dodge physical punches at the immigration office to compete for limited appointment slots for visas. Now it’s time for some exciting new goals

Was not expecting to see Korzybski graffiti in the neighborhood, but it brightened my day

Took a chance and used mezcal instead of red wine while making the sauce for this lasagna. The smokiness really goes well with the spicy salsiccia inside!

I keep coming back to this talk years later, there is so much interesting stuff in here that has been beneficial for reasoning about performance issues, even though it's ostensibly about security. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGX-...

When the German desire to incorporate English into marketing materials spectacularly backfires.

ブルスコちゃんstatus

Just increased the write throughput of my lock-free B+ tree by around 400% when it's dynamically detected that it's not being used concurrently. This is another benefit of selectively avoiding Sync in concurrent Rust. Also, now that I'm preparing to merge it into sled, I've made it MIT/Apache-2.0

"Whole essays could develop from this, in terms of how a few simple passive components in the TB-303 mimic the distress cry of a living, sentient creature." https://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/dfish/303-unique.html

Ahhhh, the old country https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnheTcWRemU

Quorum Fixer and FlexiRaft are good examples of applying both operational and theoretical best practices while scaling up large numbers of quorum-based replicated systems.

I'm so happy that This is Hexagon Sun, the Boards of Canada documentary, was also freely released. It's so wholesome and well-made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3b6EEltD4

Luiz André Barroso's work is so damn good for getting a good mindset for large scale distributed systems... As I'm refreshing some knowledge before a new job I just learned that The Datacenter as a Computer (3rd) is free to download now! https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-01761-2

Added reverse iteration and a bunch of useful atomic operations to my Rust lock-free B+ tree! * first/last/pop_first/pop_last * get_{gt/gte/lt/lte} available in concurrent-map 1.0.14 https://github.com/komora-io/concurrent-map

Over time, "hard things" like lock-free programming seem easier than basics like using files or sockets. Any program that reads a file is concurrent w/ all processes that have ever written to it. Distributed systems are (indistinguishable from being) concurrent w/ infinite instances of themselves.

The web UI at staging.bsky.app is pretty nice to use!

I have begun a chocolate eating project :]