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Notes on backend and data engineering, and the systems behind them.
No logins, no tracking, no data collection. I can't believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web.
If you find these articles useful, I'm glad. There's nothing to pay for. If you're a builder, email me your work. I'd love to see it.
Swadhin's Greatest Hits
Recent Posts
OpenCode wrote 125,000 loose Git objects into my home directory and never committed once
20% of my disk free, 2% CPU, 29% RAM, and the machine still hung. Btrfs metadata was 93% full and 125,000 of the files were loose Git objects from an agent snapshot layer.
Designing data pipelines that stay cheap
Efficient pipeline design is mostly a set of decisions about bytes scanned, work repeated, and failures survived. Here is how I reason through them, with the arithmetic shown.
Designing an API for 100,000 requests a second
The requirement was 100K rps. The work was arithmetic, a stateless tier, a cache that absorbs most of it, and a long list of things that break before the CPU does.
Flare: self-hosted webmail for my own domain
I built Flare to run mail for my own domain without an IMAP server. Astro on a Worker, Turso for state, Resend or Maileroo for delivery, webhooks for inbound.
A filesystem event log in SQLite
Point it at a folder and every create, edit, rename and delete lands in a local database. Undo, replay, fork and diff, without git in the way.
Treating a directory of TOML as a database
Hand-curated source data, generated gold tables, and a published dataset. How I keep a directory of TOML honest with code generation and CI.