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.
160 articles from this blog
Strategies for efficiently scheduling Docker containers to integration test 14+ databases in GitHub Actions, improving CI performance.
A tutorial on building a basic jq-like JSON parser in Go, focusing on memory-efficient partial parsing and using Go's profiler for optimization.
A developer shares his one-year journey building open-source data tools without funding, including stats, challenges, and future plans.
A tutorial on building a distributed PostgreSQL proof-of-concept using external libraries for SQL parsing, wire protocol, Raft consensus, and storage.
Benchmark comparison of SQLite in Go using the cgo-based mattn/go-sqlite3 package versus the pure-Go modernc.org/sqlite translation.
Exploring the hidden 'event' variable in HTML onclick attributes and how to access it for form submission handling.
A survey of SQL parser libraries across multiple programming languages, comparing handwritten vs. generated parsers and their handling of basic SELECT queries.
A tutorial on building a basic document database in Go with Lucene-like filters and indexes, inspired by Elasticsearch.
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.
