2024W28

A few interesting articles I read over the past few days

• So You Want To Build A Browser Engine — This article goes deep into all the complicated things involved in making a browser engine. It’s amazing how browsers keep getting better and adding more features while maintaining all the required complexity.

• Databricks, Snowflake and the future — This piece tells you about the recent meetings of Snowflake and Databricks. It focuses on how they are putting money into Apache Iceberg.

• The time I spent three months investigating a 7-year old bug and fixed it in 1 line of code — This is an interesting story about someone spending three months trying to fix a really old bug. And how they only needed one line of code to solve it. Nice read about debugging software and hardware.

• Local, first, forever — An insightful article on the local-first philosophy and the implementation of services without reliance on a centralized server. Includes an introduction to CRDT and a sample implementation.

• What Goes Around Comes Around… And Around… — A retrospective review of the evolution of relational database management systems over the past two decades. It gives a good overview of how things are and how have evolved.

• A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability — Explores the concept of durability in databases, challenging the notion of a write-ahead log as a universal component.

• Unix’s fsync(), write ahead logs, and durability versus integrity — Expands on Phil Eaton’s post about database durability, incorporating the crucial aspect of integrity into the discussion.

• The Right Kind of Stubborn — Paul Graham talks about two types of stubbornesss: persistence and obstinacy. He explains that it’s good to keep going when you need to, but it’s bad when you won’t change your mind.