It Works Locally
Long-form essays on distributed systems, CRDTs, real-time collaboration and production architecture. Each one starts from an idea outside software, like relativity or causality, and ends in the code that ships.
Latest · Engineering
How Yjs orders concurrent edits without trusting a single clock: item origins, the YATA tie-break, state vectors, the sync handshake and the rules you have to respect in production.
· 11 min read
Causality in collaborative editors, part 1
How a 2,500-year-old idea, Einstein's moving train, Leslie Lamport's clocks and leaderless replication all converge on one rule: no effect before its cause.
15 min read
A highly caffeinated summary of Chapter 1 from Designing Data-Intensive Applications (2nd Edition, 2026) — why modern applications are just six different data systems standing in a trench coat
20 min read
A short and simple look at why biology talks about purpose — and whether life itself really has one.
2 min read
An exploration of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the profound meaning of ‘Timshel’—the idea that human greatness lies in the power to choose.
6 min read
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