/now

A /now page: what I'm working on at this point in my life. Updated at unpredictable intervals, which is itself a kind of honesty.

Work

• Two consulting clients. One is a fintech with a Postgres replication problem I am not allowed to describe. The other is a large e-commerce platform that wants to know why their p99 spikes every Tuesday at 14:00 UTC. (I think it's a cron job. I always think it's a cron job. I am usually right but not in the way I expect.)
• Slowly building a small Go library for parsing tcpdump pcaps without loading them entirely into RAM. It's at the stage where it works on my files and explodes on yours. Not public yet.

Writing

• A long post on EEVDF that I keep almost finishing. There's a benchmark I want to run on different kernels first. I have been "almost finishing" it since January.
• Notes for a possible talk at a small Berlin meetup in May. Topic: "tail latency for people who write CRUD apps". Not pitched yet.

Reading

• "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" — Kleppmann, third re-read.
• "The Three-Body Problem" — finally. People won't shut up about it.
• The LWN backlog. Always the LWN backlog.

Outside

• Piano. Fur Elise, badly. (I am 36. I am not going to be a concert pianist. It's fine.)
• Bouldering twice a week, mostly V3-V4. My fingers hate me.
• Trying to ride my Brompton more, drive less. Berlin makes this easy.

Not doing

• Anything involving Twitter/X, LinkedIn posts, or the word "thought leader".
• Writing about LLMs. Other people are doing that fine.
• Side projects with deadlines. They stop being side projects.

Last meaningful update: a few weeks ago. If you are wondering whether the contract is still on, the answer is probably yes — I forget to update this page, not the calendar.