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 follow the threads below.
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 published
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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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Whether your program spends its time computing or waiting decides your concurrency model - and quietly picks the language that will feel effortless.
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A rate limit reads like a restriction from outside and like a promise from inside - the invariant that keeps a system in a regime where it still works.
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A queue decouples a producer from a consumer so they need not move at the same speed. Most of the queues in a system are the ones nobody drew on the diagram.
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Retries are only safe when the operation is idempotent - otherwise you get duplicate records or double charges.
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Breaking changes usually trace back to versioning, contracts, and team coordination - not just code.
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Caching gets dismissed as a hack, but it is one of the oldest principled moves in computing - spending space, and a little staleness, to buy time.
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The average request looks fine while the slowest one percent decides your reputation. Why tails happen, and how to defend them.
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Three performance numbers people blur together - and how the workload decides which one you should be optimizing.
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A map of the performance notes - how to measure speed, the mechanisms that create it, and how to keep it under load.