Murat (Distributolog)

TLA+ as a Design Accelerator: Lessons from the Industry After 15+ years of using TLA+, I now think of it is a design accelerator. One of the purest intellectual pleasures is finding a way to simpl...

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TLA+ as a Design Accelerator: Lessons from the Industry

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/tla-...

TLA+ Tilapias
#tlaplus

Monster Scale Summit Agenda Agenda Session times are displayed in your local timezone. Agenda subject to change. Wednesday 3/11 Thursday 3/12 Instant Access

Monster Scale Summit (free and virtual) starts tomorrow. Pop in to learn from an incredible lineup (@skamille.themanagerswrath.com, @antirez.bsky.social, @martin.kleppmann.com, @muratdemirbas.bsky.social, @dominiktornow.bsky.social, @teivah.dev Pat Helland, Joran Greef....) www.scylladb.com/summit

Building a Database on S3 Hold your horses. I'm not unveiling a new S3-native database. The paper is from 2008. Many of its protocols feel clunky today. Yet it nails ...

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Building a database on S3

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/buil...

a screenshot of an excerpt from an interview with Murat Demirbas about writing engineering blog posts

New tech blogger interview -- this time we’re featuring @muratdemirbas.bsky.social, who’s about to publish his 800th (!) blog post
writethatblog.substack.com/p/murat-demi...

800th blog post: Write that Blog! I had given an email interview to the "Write That Blog!" newsletter. That came out today , which coincided with my 800th blog post. I am inc...

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800th blog post: Write that Blog!

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/800t...

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Writing Away From the Screen

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/writ...

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End of Productivity Theater

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/end-...

OSTEP Chapter 9: Proportional Share Scheduling The Crux: Fairness Over Speed.  Unlike the schedulers we explored in Chapter 8 (like Shortest Job First or Multi-Level Feedback Queues) tha...

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OSTEP Chapter 9: Proportional Share Scheduling, and the Linux CFS

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/oste...

A screenshot of Gwen Shaprira's responses to questions about her blogging experiences

For our latest tech blogger interview, we’re featuring @gwenshap.bsky.social.
writethatblog.substack.com/p/gwen-shapi...

Inside the 2026 Monster Scale Summit Agenda The agenda for the 2-day Monster SCALE Summit (free + virtual) is now live! Take a look, register, and start choosing your own adventure across the 50+ tech talks. Here’s a peek at what you can expect...

We’re hosting an absolutely amazing lineup of speakers and talks this year. Take a look and pls join us if anything looks interesting. It's free + virtual. www.scylladb.com/2026/02/17/m...

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Butlers or Architects?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/butl...

I really enjoyed the observations you make here! In particular, I appreciated the need for a "distinctive voice" in one's writing. I remember my advisor insisting that I read everything I could by Carl Waldspurger because of how clearly he explained an idea.

Do You Think I Am a Goldfish? Academic writing has long been criticized for its formulaic nature. As I wrote about earlier , research papers are unfortunately written to ...

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Do You Think I Am a Goldfish?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/do-y...

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OSTEP Chapter 8. Scheduling: The Multi-Level Feedback Queue

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/oste...

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Towards a Standard for JSON Document Databases

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/towa...

OSTEP Chapters 6,7 How does your computer create the illusion of running dozens of applications simultaneously when it only has a few physical cores? Wait, I f...

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OSTEP Chapters 6,7

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/oste...

You will do it Hillel. Sending love and support. I love reading your posts and books!

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The F word

If the goal isn't actively set to help and streamline the process (if the intention isn't "how do we solve this?"), the energy of the system inevitably shifts toward finding problems. Friction becomes the product.

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/fric...

OSTEP Chapters 4,5 I recently started reading "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces" (OSTEP) as part of Phil Eaton's offline reading group . We are tackling a...

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OSTEP Chapters 4,5: Virtualization and the process abstraction

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/oste...

CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization This paper describes the architecture behind CockroachDB Serverless. At first glance, the design can feel like cheating. Rather than introd...

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CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/cock...

A Zen Talk: AI OMG! What is an LLM? How does it work? Is it conscious? Why is this all happening now?

I gave a Zen talk about AI, although it's mostly math and only a little bit of Zen. What is an LLM? How does it work? Is it conscious? emptysqua.re/blog/ai-omg/

Welcome to Town Al-Gasr Al-Gasr began as an autonomous agent town, but no one remembers now who deployed it. The original design documents were very clear. There we...

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Welcome to Town Al-Gasr

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/welc...

Agentic AI and The Mythical Agent-Month The premise of this position paper is appealing . We know Brooks' Law : adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. That is, ...

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Agentic AI and The Mythical Agent-Month

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/agen...

Rethinking the University in the Age of AI Three years ago, I wrote a post titled "Getting schooled by AI, colleges must evolve" . I argued that as we entered the age of AI, the value...

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Rethinking the University in the Age of AI

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/reth...

Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass This paper (CIDR'26) presents a comprehensive analysis of cloud hardware trends from 2015 to 2025, focusing on AWS and comparing it with ot...

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Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/clou...

The Sauna Algorithm: Surviving Asynchrony Without a Clock While sweating it out in my gym's sauna recently, I found a neat way to illustrate the happened-before relationship in distributed systems. ...

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The Sauna Algorithm: Surviving Asynchrony Without a Clock

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions about Transaction Workloads? In this blog, we had reviewed quite a number of deterministic database papers, including Calvin , SLOG , Detock , which aimed to achieve hig...

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Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions about Transaction Workloads?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/are-...

Too Close to Our Own Image? Recent work suggests we may be projecting ourselves onto LLMs more than we admit. A paper in Nature reports that GPT-4 exhibits "state anxi...

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Too Close to Our Own Image?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/too-...