I’m a big believer that database systems share similar core fundamentals at their storage layer and understanding them allows one to compare different DBMS objectively. For example, How documents are stored in MongoDB is no different from how MySQL or PostgreSQL store rows. Everything goes to disk, the trick is…

Designing software is challenging and I don’t think there is a right or wrong way of doing it. I tried several software design methods in my career and they all lacked something and never left me confident about the system I built. I tried the code-first approach where I prototype…

UI/UX design is an interesting engineering domain often referenced while building frontend applications. The user interface influences how users experience the application. How pretty the app looks, how convenient it is to use and can the user get there in fewer clicks as possible. Rarely however we discuss the impact…

I have been a backend engineer for over 18 years and I witnessed technologies come and go but one thing always remain constant; The first principals the tech is built on. I don’t really mean tools, frameworks or even languages. Those evolve and change but the fundamental infrastructure on which…

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store originally written in Perl and later rewritten in C. It is popular with companies such as Facebook, Netflix and Wikipedia for its simplicity. While the word “simple” has lost its meaning when it comes to describing software, I think Memcached is one of the…

Introduction TCP Congestion control allows the sender to fully utilize a network without flooding it with packets. This is done by controlling the rate of transmission at the sender. Middle routers hold packets temporarily in a memory buffers to be processed and routed to the next hop. When a router’s buffer…

On Interviews The truth is engineering a problem seldom has one set answer. It is often challenging, muddy, confusing and time consuming. When the problem is solved almost always there is a drawback to the solution. What makes a good engineer is understanding the limitation of the solution and working the entire…

If you are a parent, you might be familiar with the nursery rhyme “The Five Little Monkeys”. The song starts with five monkeys jumping on a bed, one by one they fall off the bed and bump their heads. Each time a monkey falls, the mom calls the doctor to…

NGINX is an open source reverse proxy and web server designed for scale. It exploded in popularity as the first line of defense to backend infrastructures. Whether as a caching layer, load balancer, an API gateway or Web server, NGINX does it all. In this article I explore the internal…