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Type 1 diabetes is a life-long autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system attacks the pancreas making it incapable of producing insulin – a hormone needed to process glucose (sugar) for energy. As a result, insulin is required multiples a time by injection, and careful monitoring to prevent glucose levels from going too high or too low – both of which can be fatal. Luckily, with technology we have devices like continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) that can monitor glucose levels in real time without the need for finger pricks....

Background Almost two years ago I decided that I wanted to write my own key-value store from scratch, however, I never got the chance to profile the code and make any performance improvements. Recently, I got an itch to look at some flamegraphs so I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to see if I can speed things up a bit. I recommend reading the previous post to get a better understanding of the work done here....

I thought it’d be fun to revisit some of the best books and blogs I read this year. Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. One of the most recommended books for learning distributed systems. I think it gives a pretty comprehensive overview of everything someone should know. I would use it more as a reference book and read chapters based on interest. Bitcask. This was one of the first papers I read this year....

Surprisingly, I’ve never had to write much SQL (i.e. any) in any of my previous jobs or current job before. So I thought it would be fun to get my hands dirty and try implementing a subset of SQL with an in-memory backend. It mostly follows from this blog post. But, I also wasn’t super interested in writing my own SQL parser, so I decided to use a fork of Vitess’ sqlparser library....

2024/11/17: Updated to include support for mutexes. There is a lot of nondeterminism (or randomness) in modern software, from the obvious like random number generation to the less obvious like syscalls, scheduling and network latency. This makes debugging and troubleshooting very troublesome especially in distributed systems where multiple machines and networks are involved. However, if we could somehow control this randomness, then this would allow us to reproduce issues at will, no matter how rare or difficult....