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
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.
A technical guide on building a performant object previewer in JavaScript to avoid UI freezes when handling large data structures.
A guide to building React applications without Webpack, using minimal configuration and CDN-hosted libraries for fast prototyping.
Explains a React UX quirk with controlled select elements and offers a solution using useEffect to ensure a valid default value.
Explores languages like Python, JavaScript, and SQLite that can run directly in a web browser, focusing on implementations like Brython and SQL.js.
A curated list of innovative, engineering-focused tech companies based in New York City, highlighting their products and technical challenges.
A tutorial on building a minimal, Jinja-inspired text templating library in Python from scratch, covering lexers, parsers, and interpreters.
A guide to overcoming fear and learning by hacking on the nginx source code, from downloading to compiling and making a simple change.
A guide to improving recursion skills by reimplementing standard library functions without using loops, with examples in JavaScript and Python.
A technical guide on adding LIMIT and OFFSET clause support to the gosql SQL database engine built in Go.
A tutorial on setting up Semgrep for static code analysis using Docker, with practical examples for writing custom linting rules.
A technical guide on writing an emulator to interpret a simple C program's ELF binary on Linux/AMD64, covering ELF parsing and instruction decoding.
An overview of active Standard ML implementations and development in 2020, highlighting new compilers, parallelism support, and community resources.
