ASCII Diagrams
A collection of educational posts featuring ASCII diagrams, originally shared on X.
What do Git, Cursor, and Dynamo all have in common? Merkle trees! These are a great data structure for tracking file changes, facilitating incremental sync with remote servers. Say we want to track changes to a codebase at a per-file level. We compute a hash for each source
Generalized Inverted Indexes (GIN) are a powerful tool in Postgres. They’re great for inverting the typical index use case. Instead of mapping “the row with ID 2 contains the value ‘become a database expert’” you flip it to say “The token ‘database’ maps to the rows with IDs 1,
Backpressure is key for well-behaved infrastructure. When databases, message queues, connection poolers, or other systems get overloaded, how do they deal with the pressure? Some software responds by allowing their resources to exhaust and end up in a crash / failure state
