A technical community for the for the passionate, the obsessed and the curious | @sysconf_ @sdsaprogram | by @_alternatewolf @mazibayo @chidiwilliams__

Pinned Tweet
As hinted earlier, our next book club series kicks off this Sunday (Jan 11) with Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA). See you there 🚀 : discord.gg/hNdUgEKgQD
This brings the throwback series of our DB Internals book club to an end! We hope the sessions help you as you go through the book. 🚨Coming up next in our book club: Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. More details coming soon!
8
36
10,893
SysDsgn retweeted
We’re excited to announce Kelechi Onyekwere (@khelechy1337) as a speaker at SysConf 2026! His talk is titled “Balancing CAP: A Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type and Distributed Hash Table Harmony.” This session digs into a research paper written by the speaker that proposes an approach to navigate traditional CAP theorem tradeoffs when building distributed systems by combining CRDTs with Kademlia Hash Tables.
1
19
67
7,840
SysDsgn retweeted
We’re excited to announce Anthony Alaribe (@tonialaribe), co-founder of @monoscope_tech, as a speaker at SysConf 2026! His talk is titled “Timefusion: Retrospective on running a custom timeseries database in production.” Anthony’s talk at #SysConf25 focused on the motivation for building Timefusion, a time series database built in Rust. This year, his talk examines the reality of powering an observability platform using Timefusion over the last year, including painful incidents, what has gone well and the techniques the @monoscope_tech team has implemented to stay fast at scale.
2
16
58
6,519
SysDsgn retweeted
We’re excited to announce Alex Idowu (@nitrocode) as a speaker at SysConf 2026! His talk is titled “How to Safely Give AI Agents a Terminal.” AI coding agents that execute commands as part of their workflows have become quite common today; however, most of them are still set up with unfettered shell access to a computer (laptop, bastion, shared runner etc.). This talk examines how to address this risk by reframing it as an isolation and lifecycle technical problem. Alex will draw lessons from his experience building Rexec, an open-source platform that provides disposable network-isolated Linux terminals in the cloud or lets you connect your own machines.
1
11
37
3,063
SysDsgn retweeted
We’re excited to announce Jennifer Chukwu (@JennifaChukwu) as a speaker at SysConf 2026! Her talk is titled “Fix one bottleneck, create another.” This talk explores the evolution of the directory scanning engine behind the filesystem analyzer Jennifer built, with a focus on design choices and the engineering needed to implement those choices. The engine evolved through four designs: single-threaded DFS, shared queue thread pool, per-thread deques, and lock-free Chase-Lev deque. Each iteration solved a problem in the previous iteration while introducing its own challenges. Ultimately, the speaker’s work here reduced scanning 2 million files from 47 secs on Linux and 65 secs on Windows) to 2 secs and 4 secs respectively.
2
20
76
2,654
SysDsgn retweeted
We’re excited to announce Peculiar Erhisohwode (@peculiarerhis) as a speaker at SysConf 2026! Her talk is titled “Mapping Deliverability: How We Rebuilt Chowdeck's Delivery Coverage with Polygons.” Before @peculiarerhis’s work, deliverability on @chowdeck was decided purely by distance, but this proved insufficient in the face of issues like flood, traffic or intermittently blocked roads. To address this, she built a more robust, layered deliverability-check flow, that used polygons to model deliverable areas and allowed the operations team to redraw the boundaries as various factors (like the aforementioned) changed. This talk focuses on the details of this implementation, including how a 4-week deadline impacted design decisions for the backbone that decides what Chowdeck can deliver today.
3
29
120
9,550
SysDsgn retweeted
We’re excited to announce Jerry Enebeli (@jerry_enebeli), Co-Founder and CEO of Blnk Finance (@blnkfinance) as a speaker at SysConf 2026! His talk is titled “The Hot Account Problem: Keeping Ledgers Correct Under Heavy Contention.” While building Blnk Finance, an open-source ledger for financial products, the @blnkfinance team had to deal with the practical limits of locking, transaction ordering, queueing, retries, and balance consistency under contention. Some approaches worked well when contention was low and broke down once a small number of balances became disproportionately busy. This talk focuses on how they address this “hot account problem,” including failure modes, trade-offs, and the architecture that was ultimately chosen!
4
18
64
2,559
SysDsgn retweeted
21 days to go until SysConf 2026! Register now: events.ringcentral.com/event… #SysConf #SysConf26
6
12
812
SysDsgn retweeted
The countdown is on — one month to SysConf 2026! Register here: events.ringcentral.com/event… #SysConf #SysConf26
10
21
692
SysDsgn retweeted
I’m really excited about our talk roster this year + some new segments we’re adding (e.g. unconference sessions). I think this will be the most impactful edition of SysConf yet! So, everyone should register and tell their friends to register. It’s Fri, Oct 2nd & Sat, Oct 3rd — plan to attend both days 😁. The team will post more about our schedule in the coming weeks! ~ @_alternatewolf
2
3
27
1,493
SysDsgn retweeted
You know it’s been a GOOD SysConf event when the timeline has good comments. Want to share your thoughts next? Register and see you at #SysConf26: events.ringcentral.com/event… #SysConf
9
17
1,084
SysDsgn retweeted
Encrypting your data with a key is the easy part. The hard question is where you keep the key, store it next to the data and a breach hands over both. So instead of guarding one key, you encrypt it with another key. In his talk at the 2025 edition of SysConf, Allen Akinkunle (@allenakinkunle ), co-founder of InfraRed, walked through envelope encryption: a data key locks the data, and a key-encryption-key locks the data key, so the only secret you guard closely sits one level removed from everything it protects.
2
6
27
1,341
SysDsgn retweeted
Set a reminder to attend our upcoming space where we talk about all things SysConf. We’ll talk about what SysConf by @sysdsgn aims to achieve. We’ll talk about previous editions and our plans for this edition. We’ll answer any questions members of our community have. And more. This edition will be hosted by @_alternatewolf and members of our organizing team. See you soon! nitter.net/i/spaces/1dxYlaB… #SysConf #SysConf26
1
6
9
480
If you've worked on an interesting technical problem and would like to share your work to help others learn, submit a proposal 😃
SysConf 2026 Call for Proposals closes in 10 Days. Submit your proposal: sessionize.com/sysconf-2026 #SysConf26 #SysConf
1
1
5
710
SysDsgn retweeted
In most databases, storage and compute are intertwined; as your data grows, you keep buying bigger servers for just storage, but you end up also paying for compute you may not need. In his talk at the 2025 edition of SysConf, Anthony Alaribe (@tonialaribe) shared how that bill outgrew his team's entire revenue, and why they broke the "never build your own database" rule by building TimeFusion to store their data in object storage instead.
1
10
28
5,075
SysDsgn retweeted
When a program crashes, the OS can dump its entire memory space to disk, including every variable, function call, register value, heap memory and so on. In her talk at the 2025 edition of SysConf, Somtochi Onyekwere (@somtochiama) drew a parallel between core dumps and airplane black boxes, and how to use them to debug the state of a binary when it crashes.
1
10
21
1,030
SysDsgn retweeted
The CfP for SysConf 2026 is now open! If you have tackled interesting technical challenges (successfully or otherwise), are researching a frontier area or spent some time in the weeds of a technical area, we’d love to hear from you: sessionize.com/sysconf-2026. Our CfP is open until 11:59 pm (WAT) on August 22nd, 2026.
2
31
51
12,722
We have lots of plans for the @sysdsgn community and we're looking for a community manager to lead the efforts. Apply if that sounds interesting to you: forms.gle/CUfBsmh8Wi4rKA6Z9. PS: It's a volunteer role.
2
11
26
2,430