Marc Brooker's Blog

Strands Decider: Why Not an Encoder?

Small Decisions: Engineering a Leading Model Or trying to, at least.

Lorenz and Little: How Much Does Your Tail Cost?

Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP A paper!

Meet Alice.

Is this blog written by AI?

Agentic software development hypothesis This is the quality content you come here for, right?

What’s Easy Now?

It’s time to be right.

Spec Driven Development isn’t Waterfall Write down what you mean.

What about juniors?

My heuristics are wrong.

Music To Build Agents By I don't have this problem, because I don't use a mouse.

SFQ: Simple, Stateless, Stochastic Fairness Roll the dice.

You Are Here Where to next?

Pass@k is Mostly Bunk Exponentially better results?

Agent Safety is a Box Keep a lid on it.

On the success of ‘natural language programming’ Specifications, in plain speech.

What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?

What Now?

Why Strong Consistency?

DSQL: Simplifying Architectures Complexity is a choice.

Fixing UUIDv7 (for database use-cases) How do I even balance a V7?

Is Systems Research Really Just About Making Numbers Bigger?

Locality, and Temporal-Spatial Hypothesis Good fences make good neighbors?

Seven Years of Firecracker Time flies like an arrow.

Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL Names are hard, ok?

LLMs as Parts of Systems Towers of Hanoi is a boring game, anyway.

Career advice, or something like it Cynicism is bad.

Systems Fun at HotOS One day somebody will tell me what systems means.

Good Performance for Bad Days Good things are good, one finds.

Decomposing Aurora DSQL Riffing, I guess.

One or Two?

What Fekete’s Anomaly Can Teach Us About Isolation Is it just fancy write skew?

Versioning versus Coordination Spoiler: Versioning Wins.

Snapshot Isolation vs Serializability Getting into some fundamentals.

DSQL Vignette: Wait!

DSQL Vignette: Transactions and Durability The hard half of a database system?

DSQL Vignette: Reads and Compute The easy half of a database system?

DSQL Vignette: Aurora DSQL, and A Personal Story It's happening.

Ten Years of AWS Lambda Everything starts somewhere.

Garbage Collection and Metastability Cleaning up is hard to do.

Resource Management in Aurora Serverless Systems, big and small.

Let’s Consign CAP to the Cabinet of Curiosities CAP?

Not Just Scale Bookmarking this so I can stop writing it over and over.

It’s always TCP_NODELAY.

MemoryDB: Speed, Durability, and Composition.

Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice?

Finding Needles in a Haystack with Best-of-K Keep track of those needles.

The Builder’s Guide to Better Mousetraps A little rubric for making a tough decision.