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baam's wiki
A personal digital garden - a growing collection of notes, half-formed ideas, and things I'm learning. Notes link to one another; start here, or take one of the paths below.
Paths through the garden
- Map of Content Budding
How Programs Actually Run MOC
A map of the runtime notes - how a program is scheduled onto threads and cores, how it shares memory without corrupting it, and what it costs to leave your own process.
9 notes
- Map of Content Budding
Performance & Latency MOC
A map of the performance notes - how to measure speed, the mechanisms that create it, and how to keep it under load.
8 notes
Now
as of July 2026- Tending
- The performance and latency cluster - six linked notes on how systems behave under load.
- Focus
- Backend and systems engineering, and getting better at explaining it in plain writing.
- Reading
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications, a chapter at a time.
Recently tended
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What this digital garden is and how to wander it.
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Reviewing material at increasing intervals to fight forgetting.
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Your program cannot touch the disk, the network, or another process on its own - only the kernel can. A system call is the one controlled crossing into kernel space, and every crossing has a toll.
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Single-threaded code runs in the order you wrote it. Put a second thread on the same memory and that stops being true - a memory model is the contract for which writes a thread is guaranteed to see, and when.
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Automatic memory management removes a class of bugs by deciding for you when memory is safe to reclaim. You pay for that convenience in a currency that only shows up under load - pauses, CPU, and headroom.
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Async is sold as strictly faster. It is really a trade - cheap concurrency for work that waits, paid for with allocation, scheduling, and lost locality that CPU-bound code gets nothing back for.