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
A technical article on optimizing Go's standard JSON encoder for large datasets, achieving up to 55% speed improvements.
A developer documents their journey of implementing a basic SMTP server in Go to receive emails from Gmail, covering DNS setup and firewall configuration.
Explains PostgreSQL wire protocol compatibility and how new databases reuse it for client compatibility, independent of query language.
A critique of thoughtless book recommendations in tech, using the classic SICP as a prime example of a poorly-suited 'must-read'.
A technical exploration of bootloader programming, building up to creating a simple text editor and a Snake game in assembly.
Introducing dsq, a command-line tool for running SQL queries against JSON, CSV, Excel, Parquet, and other data file formats.
Explains how to analyze large JSON files that exceed memory limits using partial JSON parsing techniques in Node.js.
A tutorial on building a minimal Lua interpreter with a virtual machine from scratch using the Rust programming language.
Guide to setting up SQL Server in a Docker container for integration tests within GitHub Actions workflows.
A technical guide on parsing and unzipping files in Go, exploring the ZIP file format structure and implementing a basic parser.
A performance comparison of esbuild, swc, tsc, and babel for transforming React/JSX projects, with benchmarks on speed.
Explains how to build a fast CSS preprocessor using fuzzy parsing to expand nested SCSS-like rules without a full parser.
Building a Forth-like language interpreter from scratch using PL/pgSQL in PostgreSQL, demonstrating stack-oriented programming implementation.
A tutorial exploring PL/pgSQL fundamentals like strings, arrays, recursion, and building a simple JSON parser to learn the language.
A technical exploration of performance differences between row-oriented and column-oriented data structures for in-memory data processing.
A developer shares insights and architectural notes from building a desktop application using Electron, React, and TypeScript.
An exploration of over 40 JavaScript engines beyond V8, JSC, and SpiderMonkey, detailing their use cases, implementations, and features.
A walkthrough of building a basic JSON parsing library from scratch using modern C++ features like move semantics and smart pointers.
A 2021 survey of parsing techniques used in major programming language implementations, comparing parser generators and handwritten parsers.
A guide to building a modern web application using Common Lisp on the JVM with the ABCL implementation, Jooby, and Pebble templates.
