Archive - The Coder Cafe

Services in Space

From a disastrous job interview to building service architecture for spacecraft.

Jun 3 • Teiva Harsanyi

May 2026

Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems

The system is technically up, effectively down.

May 27 • Teiva Harsanyi

LSM Trees Explained

LSM trees make a deliberate choice: optimize for updates, accept read amplification as the cost.

May 20 • Teiva Harsanyi

AI for Production

Active incidents can be cognitively brutal.

May 13 • Teiva Harsanyi

Cache Use Cases Explained

The cache didn't change. The code didn't change. The system grew around the cache, and the cache quietly became load-bearing.

May 6 • Teiva Harsanyi

April 2026

How Linux 7.0 Broke PostgreSQL

Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload.

Apr 29 • Teiva Harsanyi

The Reading Room is Open

And You're Invited

Apr 24 • Teiva Harsanyi

Systems Thinking Explained

Your system isn't broken because of bad engineering. It's broken because you're reacting to events without seeing the structure that produces them.

Apr 22 • Teiva Harsanyi

How an SSD Works

Your SSD doesn't just store data, it relies on quantum physics to do it.

Apr 15 • Teiva Harsanyi

March 2026

Working on Complex Systems

My Talk at the Monster SCALE Summit 2026

Mar 24 • Teiva Harsanyi

3 Bullets and a Call to Action

When communicating via email or chat, people prefer short and memorable messages that do not require too much cognitive effort to process.

Mar 18 • Teiva Harsanyi

Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 8

Mar 11 • Teiva Harsanyi

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