The Raft consensus log, dissected at the byte level.
A line-by-line reading of the canonical Raft implementation, the seven places it can lose data, and the test harness we used to prove it.
Vol. 13 / No. 47 · Weekly since 2012
The practitioner's library for serious software engineers.
Depth over hype — written by working seniors, peer-reviewed by a second, benchmarked on reproducible hardware. Shipped every Tuesday since 2012.
Editor's note
Why peer review, in 2024.
The internet does not need another algorithm-grind interview blog, and it certainly does not need another AI-generated rewrite farm. TechProgramming is a working engineer's alternative — a quiet, slow publication run by a 42-person editorial collective of senior engineers from Google, Stripe, Mozilla, Jane Street, and Cloudflare.
Every article is written by a practicing senior engineer, peer-reviewed by a second, and benchmarked on reproducible hardware in our in-house runtime lab (ARM, x86, WASM). The median piece runs 4,200 words and 11 minutes 40 seconds of reading. Nothing ships until two humans have argued about it and the data is published with the article — not behind a paywall, not in a footnote, not summarised into a marketing takeaway.
David Reimer & Priya Chandrasekar, founders · Berlin, 2024
This week's issue
Vol. 13 / No. 47 — Table of contents.
Six long reads, four reference sheets, one benchmark drop. Shipped Tuesday, peer-reviewed by Thursday, on the page by Friday morning.
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What Linux actually does on a page fault — a 4,200-word walk through the kernel, with a runnable reproducer.
From the TLB miss to the swap-in path, traced on kernel 6.8 with perf, bpftrace, and a deliberately misbehaving workload.
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Memory ordering on ARM: a working engineer's field guide, with diagrams and a checklist.
DMB, DSB, ISB, the load-load, load-store, store-store quadrants, and why your CI passes on x86 but flakes on Graviton.
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The TLS 1.3 state machine, redrawn from the RFC with the failure modes a working engineer actually hits.
Key update, 0-RTT replay, early data rejection, and the four ways a session resumption silently breaks production.
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Postgres at 50k writes/sec: a candid teardown of the WAL, the buffer manager, and the indexes that stop working first.
A 48-hour benchmark with raw IO traces, the configuration knobs that actually moved the needle, and the ones that did nothing.
From the archive
1,847 deep reads since 2012 — a small selection.
The full index averages 4,200 words per article. The four below are the ones readers return to most often.
Why your memcpy is fast on x86 and slow on ARM — one cache line at a time.
We benchmarked seven libc implementations across three ISAs and published the raw traces. The result is not the one the benchmarks usually claim.
Authenticated encryption, in the order the bytes actually travel.
A working engineer's reading of AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305, and the four foot-guns that appear in production code review every quarter.
The 3am page: a postmortem of a memory leak we did not, in fact, have.
How a misconfigured kernel accounting module masqueraded as an application leak across three on-call rotations, and the diagnostic that finally cracked it.
From a recent letter to the editor
“Most engineering publications are written for people who want to sound senior in a meeting. TechProgramming is written for people who actually have to ship the thing at 3am. I cancelled four other subscriptions the week I subscribed.”
— A staff engineer at a major infrastructure company, in correspondence shared with the editor's permission
The publication, in metrics
By the numbers.
- 1,847
- Articles in the archive
- Milestone 2,000 marked in 2024 · 1,000 in 2017
- 30,000+
- Newsletter subscribers
- 9.2% month-over-month organic growth, Q3 2024
- 11:40
- Median reading time
- The longest of any top-50 engineering blog tracked by Parse.ly
- 48,000+
- GitHub stars on the benchmark repo
- Every claim ships with a runnable, reproducible test
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