April 20, 2025

The Patronus Charm

That which does not make a man worse than he was, also does not make his life worse, nor does it harm him either from without or from within.

March 30, 2025

The Timezone Turbulence

In programming, the one thing you would either never come across (if everything goes well) or learn pretty much the hard way is handling Timezones and date calculations.

December 31, 2024

Metrics Mayhem

This is an incident that caused the disk I/O to surge by 200x, database latency to increase from a few milliseconds to ~30 seconds, and a perfectly running Grafana dashboard to turn into a digital sloth...

November 19, 2024

On Binary Search

After solving a few binary search problems on LeetCode, I’m beginning to appreciate the elegant generality of this algorithm...

November 3, 2024

How Websockets are Scaled

When a client initiates a Websocket connection, it sends an HTTP request with the `Upgrade` header set to `websocket`, signaling its intent to establish the connection. Once the TCP connection is established, each request must be routed to the correct server, which can add latency and processing overhead if examined at Layer 7...

September 10, 2024

Deepwalking in Clojure

If you were to guess the missing part of the sentence — “My name __ John Doe” what would you guess? Most people would answer this with an “is.” You essentially guess a word that has the highest probability of being there. Interestingly enough, machines also work the same way...

June 29, 2024

A Man with a 40 years old Backpack

On a Wednesday evening, as I stood in the parking lot after our weekly office football...

February 8, 2024

How Artists are Made

It has been around six years since I started learning to play the sitar. When I look back, I see that the part where I was learning “how to play the sitar” was just the initial 2 to 3 years. After that, it has been more about learning how to create quality music.

December 14, 2023

The Essence of Apache Kafka

Imagine that you go to your usual coffee place and encounter a gigantic queue. Going a little further, you realize that each individual has to wait in line until the coffee is prepared and handed over to them, as opposed to just placing the order at the counter and moving on...