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I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful.

I listened to a recent episode of Cal Newport's "Deep Questions" podcast, where he interviews Emile P.

This is the second half of my HPTS 2026 notes.

Jim Gray started HPTS 42 years ago, and it still runs the same way at Asilomar with 0 proceedings, 1 track, 100 invited people, and ample discussion breaks.

Atlas Infinite, which dropped in public preview on September 29 alongside MongoDB 9.0, delivers a significant architectural update payload: compute-storage disaggregation.

General methods that scale with computation will inevitably displace hand-engineered domain knowledge!

My quest for a principled solution for metastable failures has taken me back to my roots on self-stabilization, as this recent paper related the problem to composition of self-stabilizing systems.

AI doomerism is everywhere these days.

Aleksey and I are back to reading papers live.

Last week I wrote about modular verification of systems through open TLA+ specs and rely-guarantee discharge.

Today, tech folk are scrambling to change their workflows to meet newly inflated 5X productivity quotas, while getting pummeled under the cognitive debt of agent-generated code.

Preamble.

I am a distributed systems researcher.

Specula is an agentic system that automates the process of software bug finding through authoring and model-checking a spec for the code.

This week, I presented this paper at ICCCN'26.

The Aurora DSQL paper finally dropped.

Metastability has been studied in previous work as a self-sustaining degradation in goodput that persists even after the trigger is gone.

Moving is not for the faint of heart!

Looking at my peak male physique, and my Keanu Reeves baby face, you would never suspect it, but I recently turned 50.

In 1957, Parkinson postulated his "Law of Triviality" using a fictitious committee reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant.

We spent 10 days in Italy in early April.

Shortly after I joined MongoDB research, we ran a TLA+ workshop.

The transformative power of LLMs in coding has been irrefutable, and it feels like we are living through a magical computing renaissance.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I traveled to San Jose at the end of May for the ACM CAIS conference.

Last week, I traveled to San Jose to attend the ACM CAIS conference.

Chess is a lot trickier than it looks.

This is part of our series going through OSTEP book chapters.

I listened to this book as an audiobook through the Libby app, which basically brings your public library to your phone.

When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn.

Ok, finally getting sometime to put my butt down to write about day 2 of BugBash.

These are my notes from the afternoon sessions of BugBash'26.

Continuing with notes from the BugBash talks.

I attended the BugBash 2026 these last two days, and had a blast.

This is a short chapter covering the nuts and bolts of memory allocation in C: malloc(), free(), and the many ways programmers get them wrong.