Yesterday was our final @southbaysystems.xyz talk event of 2025 (what a year!). Huge thanks to @julianhyde.bsky.social and Yuanyuan for their awesome talks! A big shout-out to our amazing host, @startreedata.bsky.social, for the venue and food!

The South Bay Systems talk series is back on Oct 2nd.

@codedrift.social will talk about the history and novel use cases of WebAssembly. Perfect timing too: Wasm 3.0 just released, and it is turning 10 this year.

Huge thanks to @yugabytedb.bsky.social for hosting!

Register here: luma.com/p3mibf27

☕️ Friends in the Bay Area: August coffee chat time!

We're hosting the @southbaysystems.xyz August Coffee Chat next week. Come hang out with other systems folks for some casual conversations.

🗓 Thursday, August 28, 5–6 pm
📍 Courtyard outside Philz Sunnyvale
🔗 lu.ma/97e10ef4

Hope to see you there!

Recording for those who missed the talk:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdg3...

We had our biggest @southbaysystems.xyz meetup yet last night! Thanks to everyone who came, and thanks to Databricks for hosting!

@andypavlo.bsky.social discussed the 50-year history of database tuning, applying AI/ML to the problem, and the future of auto-tuning (agentic reasoning, of course).

We just wrapped up an amazing event yesterday. And we're already gearing up for the next big one with @andypavlo.bsky.social

TIL you can change the endianness of some processors during runtime!

ARM processors can reverse endianness of a 32 bit value using the `rev` instruction.

But with the privileged `SETEND` instruction, you can change all data operations to become the endianness of your choosing.

Being out of school has me missing the days where I could talk to folks excited about systems. South Bay Systems club is how I get my fix lately.

If you feel the same way, come on out to the coffee chat we're hosting on Thursday June 5th. Philz Coffee Sunnyvale. 5-6pm.

🔗: lu.ma/67yxr1pn?tk=...

The next South Bay Systems meetup is live! 🦆

We're excited to invite @hannes.muehleisen.org co-founder of @duckdb.org for a talk on "Wrangling Data with DuckDB".

🗓️ April 23 at 6pm
📌 Hosted by Databricks at their Mountain View office.
Register at lu.ma/ri5kt4vt

Follow us: @southbaysystems.xyz

The recording from our inaugural talk, "It's Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter" by John Ousterhout, is now live! Thanks again to Yugabyte for the great venue, and the recording setup!

youtu.be/Nh-WZZi-Zic

Come check out what the future of the Delta looks like in my talk on kernel!!

The SF Systems Meetup is back! On 2/27, we're excited to have headline talks from the creator of FizzBee and a research collaborator with Signal. This is going to be a super fun night diving deep into making distributed protocols work, hope you'll join us! lu.ma/vqjf30k3

I’ve worked on performance engineering for ~13 years. Queuing theory has been my go-to framework the entire time -- thinking in terms of arrivals, departures, queues, servers, service rates, latencies, waiting times, and priorities. It’s simple to apply and doesn’t require diving into the math.

TLS is critical to communication security (ex: in TCP). You could import a TLS library like rustls, or you can link with the native TLS dynamic library. This dynamic library is shared by all the processes in the OS.

I’d previously had trouble seeing how distributed analytical DBs differ from MapReduce (MR) and dataflow engines (DFE) like Spark or Flink. Kleppmann makes the distinction crystal clear in DDIA (chapter 10):

Switch on type is a poor man’s virtual dispatch.

There’s so much cool hardware and OS research going into improving DBs. These include offloading parts of TCP to hardware, kernel bypass with DPDK, RDMA for microsecond remote reads, reducing SSD write amplification with Zoned SSDs, unikernels, and more

transactional.blog/blog/2024-mo...

It’s cool to finally see Devin from cognition labs out in the wild. Here it is contributing to delta-kernel-rs with a full transcript of the conversation

github.com/delta-io/del...