Working on Complex Systems

My Talk at the Monster SCALE Summit 2026

Mar 24 • Teiva Harsanyi

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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

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Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 8

Concurrency

Mar 11 • Teiva Harsanyi

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February 2026

Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 7

Block-Based SSTables and Indexing

Feb 26 • Teiva Harsanyi

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January 2026

Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 6

Block-Based SSTables and Indexing

Jan 21 • Teiva Harsanyi

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Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 5

Leveling and Key-Range Partitioning

Jan 14 • Teiva Harsanyi

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The Cold Start Problem

The cold start problem is a chicken-and-egg trap: no users without value, no value without users.

Jan 7 • Teiva Harsanyi

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December 2025

Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 4

Deletes, Tombstones, and Compaction

Dec 17, 2025 • Teiva Harsanyi

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Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 3

Durability with Write-Ahead Logging

Dec 3, 2025 • Teiva Harsanyi

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November 2025

Linus Torvalds vs. Ambiguous Abstractions

There’s no issue with abstracting code into a helper function. If we want to optimize for cognitive load, the intent should be as clear as possible…

Nov 26, 2025 • Teiva Harsanyi

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Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 2

LSM Tree Foundations

Nov 19, 2025 • Teiva Harsanyi

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Nothing Beats Kindness

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

Nov 13, 2025 • Teiva Harsanyi

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