Creating a listener on the backend application that accepts connections is simple. You listen on an address-port pair, connection attempts to that address and port will get added to an accept queue; The application accepts connections from the queue and start reading the data stream sent on the connection. However…

I like screen capping software error messages and speculate what the cause or bug might have been. It let me put myself in the engineer shoes who wrote the software and think of their behalf. Sometimes, you can tell so much from an error code. I’m wrong most of the…

A short story portraying the software engineer archetype Preface Engineers are incredibly smart. This could be a product of the complex problems they usually work on and the abundance of solutions a given problem can have. This is especially true for software engineering problems. With so many roads leading to Rome, it becomes attractive for engineers to favor the…

Software engineering is a big and constantly evolving domain with new innovations. While this is true, most -if not all- technologies in software engineering tend to eventually coalesce into few first principals. The engineer is better served learning the fundamentals of software engineering instead of frameworks, languages or platforms that…

Databases often use fixed-size pages to store data. Tables, collections, rows, columns, indexes, sequences, documents and more eventually end up as bytes in a page. This way the storage engine can be separated from the database frontend responsible for data format and API. Moreover, this makes it easier to read…

In the last 8 years I’ve seen an increase of articles and YouTube videos with titles such as “Boost app performance with this framework” or “3x times the throughput with this database” or “This language is the C killer”. …

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…