Thuvarakan's Blog - Software Engineering & Tech Insights

Why the same append-only structure keeps appearing under databases, streaming systems, replication, and filesystems — and which ordering, durability, and replay decisions actually matter.

The Transactional Outbox pattern writes the business state change and an outbox message in the same local database transaction.

The Strangler pattern incrementally replaces parts of a legacy system.

A sidecar is a separate process or container that runs alongside an application instance.

Instead of storing current state, the service appends every state-changing event to an immutable log (event store).

CQRS separates the model used to change state from the model used to answer queries.

A translation layer that maps between your clean domain model and the "corrupt" (messy, foreign) model of a legacy or third-party system.

Cheaper implementation makes everything else more expensive.

Why a stack of matrix multiplications needs a nonlinear operation between the layers, or the depth buys nothing.

Dot products, matrix shapes, and the one rule that governs whether two arrays can multiply.

An assignment of non-negative numbers summing to one over a set of outcomes, and the sampling it supports.

Average and spread — and why controlling spread is most of what odd-looking constants in neural networks are for

Rate of change, partial derivatives, and the composition rule that makes backpropagation possible.

The inverse of exponentiation: the power a base must be raised to in order to produce a number.

Relationships of the form y = ax^k, which appear as straight lines on log-log axes.

A benchmark from Surge AI drops an agent into a company with a 20 to 124 page policy document and grades whether the document actually constrains it.

I was using AI before I had tried to understand the task.

A write-ahead log records changes durably before related data pages may reach permanent storage.

The TLS handshake negotiates security parameters, authenticates peers, and derives traffic keys.

Operational practices for deploying TLS with verifiable identities, automated renewal, and tested policy.

Transport Layer Security protects application data in transit and authenticates one or both peers.

A saga coordinates committed local transactions and compensating actions across a long-running workflow.

RabbitMQ request-reply options using explicit callback queues or Direct Reply-To.

A comparison of pull-based polling and push-based webhooks for asynchronous result delivery.

Multi-Version Concurrency Control serves row versions according to transaction visibility rules.

Java wrapper equality depends on whether code compares primitive values, object identity, or object values.

The Domain Name System resolves names through delegated zones, recursive resolvers, authoritative servers, and caches.

Distributed commit protocols coordinate one commit-or-abort decision across transactional participants.

A transaction groups database operations into a unit with defined atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability guarantees.

An opaque identifier used to associate messages and logs that belong to the same logical exchange.

Certificate validation links a peer identity to a configured trust anchor through signed certificates.

A request-response workflow where processing completes after the initiating call has returned.

Architecture patterns are structural choices evaluated against system constraints and expected change.

A small, practical book on tidyings - tiny safe structural changes - and how to reason about when design work is worth it as an economic decision.

A simple story about mice and men takes on a heavier weight when the "cheese" is the coding work you spent years mastering.

Notes on Ousterhout's take on managing complexity through modular design, deep modules, and information hiding.

How I use focused specifications, reviewable changes, and independent validation when working with coding agents.

A transaction must transform the database from one consistent state to another consistent state.

A transaction must transform the database from one consistent state to another consistent state.

Isolation is the "I" in ACID - it governs how concurrent transactions interact with each other in a database.

Atomicity ensures the All-or-Nothing behavior of a transaction.

How Redis 7.4 stores keys and values using dictionaries, objects, listpacks, skip lists, radix trees, and compact string encodings.

mTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security) is a security process that ensures traffic is secure and trusted in both directions between a client and a server.

Cyclomatic complexity is used to measure the complexity of a program

Design pattern to manage the data model

Design pattern to facilitate asynchronous programming

Explains HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Explains Google Remote Procedure Call

Explains remote procedural call

Explains Protocol Buffers