New post: I added Direct I/O support to Cassandra for compaction reads, cutting p99 read latency by 5x (and p50 a little).
Walks through the page cache mechanics, benchmarking, and when to enable it. Some funky charts along the way.
https://t.co/wvsVSGJVj7
If you're interested in SSD internals and how to use them efficiently, our paper, “How to Write to SSDs,” has been accepted to VLDB and is currently on the Hacker News front page. https://t.co/bwYAtPFTBg
During my time at @awscloud I tried to be an astute observer of how the Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineers carried themselves in new projects/teams and design reviews. This has made a lasting impact on how I operate as well as evaluate others.
All of these "Very Senior" engineers are smart but the absolute best ones were humble, secure, incredibly curious, and appreciated the history and path of a system. They can jump into whole new domains and immediately win over the people under them that ultimately do the work.
The worst Very Senior engineers show up and inflict their insecurity by asking divisive and superficial questions like "why didn't you use {{language foo}} or {{database bar}} or {{platform qux}}?" These very questions reveal their inner fear: they don't have the depth and breadth their position requires.
As a manager, it took me far too long to learn that meetings aren't actual work. I thought meetings drove output. Turns out, most meetings are about control, not collaboration. About signaling ambition versus pursuing it. If you can't pass these three tests, cancel the meeting:
New Engineering blog: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C compiler. Then we (mostly) walked away. Two weeks later, it worked on the Linux kernel.
Here's what it taught us about the future of autonomous software development.
Read more: https://t.co/htX0wl4wIf
10 days into 2026:
- Terence Tao announces GPT & Aristotle solve Erdős problem autonomously
- Linus Torvalds concedes vibe coding is better than hand-coding for his non-kernel project
- DHH walks back “AI can’t code” from Lex podcast 6 months later
An acceleration is coming the likes of which humanity has never experienced before