🇨🇦 Backend Brat. Distributed Diva. Relentless Learner.
Canada
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I disconnected from social media for a few weeks around my bday so apologies for replies I owe you
I have been dreaming of a future where humans and toasters see low level tradeoffs right in the code.
Memory layouts and encodings obvious, composable, swappable as lang concepts
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With my 3 token resets expiring in 5 days I asked Sol Astra Ultra to build a unikernel that talks directly to AWS NVMe queues and NIC queues and ChatGPT hires a team of 53 engineers apparently 😂
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Why don’t OSS projects post specs and prompts for work they want done? I have 3 token resets that expire in 5 days.
That’s a lot of compute I could donate.
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@danawhite Didn’t u enter boxing to make it better cuz of so much promotional complexity, belts & promoter drama?
All you’ve done is selfishly made it about you & Eddie not fighters & fans. Using fighters as leverage & adding more confusing belts
Boxing worse w/ u
@lthomasnews
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Like the early NoSQL days we are seeing a surge of orgs building distributed DB engines from scratch without the experience on their teams.
There will be a phase of dog shit systems and stupid data anomalies all over the place.
Be careful who you trust with your data, for now
I love TLA+ as much as the next person but CellD & Walgit both had TLA+ specs and I exposed trivial distsys bugs in both in about an hour
I don’t even consider myself good at this stuff I’m just a passionate learner
AI is great but for now the operators skills still matters
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I love TLA+ as much as the next person but CellD & Walgit both had TLA+ specs and I exposed trivial distsys bugs in both in about an hour
I don’t even consider myself good at this stuff I’m just a passionate learner
AI is great but for now the operators skills still matters
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I think I need a mentor for advice on which side project to focus on 😂
AI has really enabled me to feed my insatiable appetite for learning and exploring but spread too thin.
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Kelly Sommers retweeted
New blog series: DocumentDB (MongoDB compatibility on PostgreSQL) performance deep dives. Starting with $group, covering distinct index scans—comparing with MongoDB execution plans:
dev.to/franckpachot/document…
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Also it got I/O Completion Ports (IOCP) quite a bit before Linux got io_uring I believe. I used to get roasted by Linux folks when I said the I/O kinda sucked compared to the NT kernel.
You can be a fan of the NT kernel even if you don’t like the direction of Windows.
Say what you will about Windows (OS), but the NT kernel really is an engineering marvel that still puts Linux to shame in many ways.
The quickest way to describe it for a programmer, is NT was more like an object-oriented language, with a strong security model from day one, whereas Linux is very…not.
A lot of the “good” features in Linux feel bolted-on (SELinux, Capabilities, Namespaces) because…well they were. I love to imagine an alternate history where NT won.
IMO, Microsoft *should* have made an “Open NT” in the early 2000s; not fully GPL-style open, but one where a large org could say…swap out a memory allocator for their own. (they sorta did this with limited source access, but it was too restrictive)
You could imagine say…an early Amazon forking OpenNT to create an “AmazonNT” for EC2, where they have a modified scheduler, network stack, whatever. But, the security+compatibility contract keeps a stable baseline on the Microsoft side.
Controversial take, but if we enter this era where users are giving AI agents increasingly higher levels of access control; the Linux kernel is legitimately a poor fit. Think about it; answer the question “What exactly is this AI agent allowed to do?”
On Standard Linux, it’s disgustingly messy with lots of overlap.
Do you use UIDs? GIDs? ACLs? CGROUPs? Policies? SELinux? Filesystem modes? There’s not a singular coherent graph of capabilities you can point to. Too many ways you can escape an initially narrow scope.
NT, by comparison, can go the route of explicitly typed resources, and then you could have these really strong centralized audit trails when an agent goes haywire…etc.
I know I’m rambling, but the point is…if you were greenfielding an OS kernel from scratch, in 2026, with the intent of being forward-looking, it would *not* look like Linux. Frankly, it’d probably look a lot closer to NT, or even a BSD fork…
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One of the funny AI experiences I’ve had in building HoloStore’s Accord consensus algorithm inspired from Cassandra Codex 5.4 back then somehow _tried_ to mix ePaxos and Accord into one.
I’m assuming it connected the dots Accord was tackling the same prob as ePaxos in Cassie.
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The real spicy timeline of mine is the drafts I’ve never posted.
I have some thoughts about what was said at Rails conf but I’ve already felt the toxicity of how he enjoys using his celebrity and massive audience to publicly embarrass and bully folks daily and it’s gross.
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Kelly Sommers retweeted
Excellent work on formally verifying the #Kubernetes control plane using a compositional approach led by @Cat_overflow and @xu_dong_sun, with the awesome team of @NikhilDate5 @tylergu_jiawei Cody @tchajed and Oded. It shows a practical path to verify a large control plane by gradually verifying individual controllers progressively.
The compositional verification is enabled by a new spec termed CORE (COmpositional REconciliation), which reuses ESR (the original #anvil spec) to specify each controller's reconciliation and employs rely-guarantee conditions to restrict inter-controller interference. CORE encodes both liveness and safety -- liveness captures correct state reconciliation logic and safety restricts inter-controller interference.
Check out the paper which has a great amount of insights on specification, proof, and implementation.
cathy-cai.page/pubs/welder26…
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I disconnected from social media for a few weeks around my bday so apologies for replies I owe you
I have been dreaming of a future where humans and toasters see low level tradeoffs right in the code.
Memory layouts and encodings obvious, composable, swappable as lang concepts
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Kelly Sommers retweeted
A few reflections heading home from the Bills game tonight as a Canadian. 🇨🇦🇺🇸🏈
There is a lot of noise in the Canada-U.S. relationship right now. Trade fights, tariffs, political rhetoric and plenty of frustration on both sides of the border.
But then you spend a night in Buffalo.
Canadians and Americans tailgating together. Singing both anthems. Cheering for the same team. Talking football, families and life. Nobody asking who won the latest political argument.
It is a good reminder that our relationship is much bigger than whoever happens to occupy political office at any particular moment.
We share communities, businesses, friendships, families, sports and a border that has connected us for generations.
Governments will disagree. We should stand up for our respective interests when they do.
But we shouldn’t lose sight of each other in the process.
Tonight felt like a reminder of that.
Break tables, not relationships. 🇨🇦🤝🇺🇸
#BillsMafia #GoBills
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this is actually literally insane because it doesn’t appear to have any trade-offs. it’s just better engineering.
the linked blog goes into detail about the implementation: mapping to CTIDs, various bitmaps, AVX, doing all this while they keep all the postgres constraints, etc.
Today we introduce TIN: a powerful and reliable full-text search extension for Postgres.
TIN works with complicated WHERE clauses, replication, backups, and maintains correct transaction visibility.
It's also mind-blowingly fast.
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Xbox CEO Asha Sharma revealed she's been secretly solving Xbox support tickets for months, stepping into customer service and fixing problems for players anonymously.
She wanted to figure out what players don't like and decided to just talk to them directly.
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Kelly Sommers retweeted
Inside TiDB X | Write
Client -> Raft commit -> MemTable Apply -> ACK.
SST creation, upload and file publication run on a separate background path.
Benefit: writes don't wait for their SSTs to reach object storage.
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Kelly Sommers retweeted
Meta has 500,000 database hosts
How do you manage database connections when you have 1M+ clients hitting 500k+ database hosts? We’re sharing a deep dive into ZGateway, the stateless proxy tier handling traffic for ZippyDB (>1B ops/sec).
The direct-access model created an unbounded TLS connection mesh, wasting CPU and causing OOM crashes during reconnection storms. ZGateway decoupled the fleets, dropping per-host connections by 97–98% with just a 6% compute overhead.
Read the full engineering deep dive here: engineering.fb.com/2026/09/0…
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