4 posts on the things I keep having to re-derive — consensus, type inference, rendering pipelines, and the tools that sit underneath them.
Leader election is the part everyone remembers. The interesting rules live in log matching, commit indexes, and the two places Raft refuses to trust a majority.
Why real type checkers split into two mutually recursive modes — inference and checking — and how that split makes annotations land exactly where you'd expect.
max-age is a blunt instrument. The interesting behaviour lives in the freshness lifetime, the stale window, and who is allowed to serve what during a revalidation.
Log-structured merge trees turn random writes into sequential ones. The bill arrives later, during compaction — and the shape of that bill is a knob you control.