Now

Work

Distributed database team at Zoho. The engine is a horizontally scalable distributed PostgreSQL: data sharded across nodes, queries planned and executed across them, transactions that span nodes committing with two-phase commit.

My share of it right now is the shard lifecycle (the operations that extend, retire and rebalance ranges while the cluster is serving, each one rehearsable against live metadata before it mutates anything) and a read-only verifier that reads the whole cluster and reports what disagrees. In C, debugged in LLDB across a multi-node cluster.

Learning

PostgreSQL’s write-ahead log and transaction code paths, closely enough to explain them. Logical decoding from the plugin side: what the log actually hands you, and what it does not. C, properly this time.

Building

This site. A set of “explained simply” posts on PostgreSQL internals, starting with the write-ahead log. A small key-value engine in C on the side, to feel the difference between a B-tree and an LSM-tree rather than read about it.

Deliberately not doing

Frontend frameworks. Certifications.