Phil Eaton is a staff engineer working on Postgres and software internals, sharing insights on databases, systems engineering, and life deep in the software stack.
152 articles from this blog
An analysis of key qualities that define excellent non-corporate technical blogs, including tackling complex topics and showing working code.
Author shares their experience starting a successful asynchronous paper reading club at work, focused on databases and distributed systems research.
A technical guide on using the memleak tool from bcc to find memory leaks in a running Postgres C program, comparing it to Valgrind.
A developer compares memory management, standard libraries, and explicit allocation in Zig, Rust, Go, and C from a systems programming perspective.
A software engineer shares strategies for onboarding to a new database team, focusing on build processes, documentation, and initial code contributions.
Explains the fundamentals of distributed consensus algorithms like Raft, used in transactional databases and systems like Kubernetes.
A developer details their week-long project building a minimal, in-memory storage engine for MariaDB/MySQL in C++, covering the process and API comparisons.
A developer shares personal experiences creating tech communities, from Discord groups to book clubs, and reflects on the challenges and rewards of organizing.
A technical deep dive into intercepting and walking PostgreSQL query execution plans to reconstruct SQL and enable custom evaluation.
A guide to creating an in-memory storage engine for PostgreSQL using the Table Access Method API introduced in version 12.
A technical exploration of using Linux's io_uring for asynchronous file writing, comparing implementations in Go and Zig to build intuition.
Benchmarking Go database drivers for SQLite and PostgreSQL on insert-heavy workloads, showing performance differences between popular and alternative drivers.
A technical guide on using ptrace to intercept and modify Linux system calls for fault injection, written in Zig.
Explores how different database systems execute query expressions, comparing tree-walking interpreters, virtual machines, and JIT compilers.
An exploration of functional programming concepts, arguing for practicing core tenets in familiar languages rather than learning new ones like Haskell.
TigerBeetle's distributed database is now testable in-browser via WebAssembly, featuring a deterministic simulator with network and disk fault injection.
A technical guide on using Zig's metaprogramming features, specifically reflection, to parse CSS into typed structs and pretty-print the results.
A technical guide to implementing the Raft distributed consensus protocol in Go, covering leader election and log replication.
A developer recommends two essential books for improving professional programming skills: one on browser networking and one on data-intensive applications.
A software developer shares a curated list of high-quality, topic-specific tech subreddits for advancing programming skills.
