Writing

Notes on systems, backends, and the things I take apart.

Long-form pieces live here, shorter ones live on Medium and X. Most of it is me working through how something actually behaves under load rather than how the docs say it should. Scroll down for the playground, where a few of these ideas are things you can poke at directly.

Pieces published

Topics covered

Places I publish

Feed

Everything I’ve written, in one stream.

Topic

Source

Site8 min read

The request lifecycle, one layer at a time

Walking a single request from the browser to the database and back, and what each layer is actually responsible for.

SystemsBackendArchitecture

Aug 29, 2026Read

X2 min read

TODO — X thread title

Placeholder entry. Swap the title, summary, date and URL for a real thread.

Notes

Jun 14, 2026Open

Site · Medium8 min read

Thinking in Hexagons: Understanding Uber's H3 Geospatial Indexing System

How Uber turns raw geographic coordinates into scalable spatial computation using hierarchical hexagonal indexing.

SystemsArchitectureDistributed Systems

May 17, 2026Read

Playground

Things you can actually poke at.

Reading about backpressure is one thing. Dragging a slider until the system falls over is another. These are small, honest simulations of ideas I keep running into.

Traffic shaping

Token bucket rate limiter

Drag the sliders and watch bursts get absorbed or thrown away in real time.

Bucket capacity8 tokensRefill rate3 tokens/sIncoming traffic6 req/s

Push traffic above the refill rate and the bucket drains: the burst gets absorbed by whatever tokens were saved up, then everything after that is throttled. Capacity buys you burst tolerance, refill rate buys you sustained throughput. They are not the same dial.

Tokens available

8.0 / 8

Recent requests

Allowed

Throttled

100%

Pass rate