Fundamentals
13 posts in category “Fundamentals”.
Database Internals: Storage Engines, Transactions, and Recovery
2025-12-21A deep technical walkthrough of how databases store data, ensure correctness, and recover from crashes — covering B-trees, LSM-trees, write-ahead logging, MVCC, isolation levels, and replication.
CPU Microarchitecture: Pipelines, Out-of-Order Execution, and Modern Performance
2025-12-04An in-depth exploration of CPU microarchitecture: instruction pipelines, hazards, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, register renaming, superscalar and SIMD units, and how software maps to hardware for performance.
TLS, PKI, and Secure Protocols: How Encrypted Web Traffic Works
2025-11-18A deep technical guide to TLS, certificate validation, key exchange, record protection, modern cipher suites, TLS 1.3, QUIC, and practical deployment best practices for secure networked applications.
Distributed Systems: Consensus, Consistency, and Fault Tolerance
2025-10-20Fundamentals of distributed systems: failure models, consensus algorithms (Paxos, Raft), CAP theorem, consistency models, gossip, membership, CRDTs, and practical testing strategies like Jepsen.
Memory Allocation and Garbage Collection: How Programs Manage Memory
2025-02-20A deep dive into how programming languages allocate, track, and reclaim memory. Understand malloc internals, garbage collection algorithms, and the trade-offs that shape runtime performance.
Concurrency Primitives and Synchronization: From Spinlocks to Lock-Free Data Structures
2024-03-15A comprehensive exploration of concurrent programming fundamentals, covering mutexes, spinlocks, semaphores, condition variables, memory ordering, and lock-free programming techniques that enable safe parallel execution.
Unicode and Character Encoding: From ASCII to UTF-8 and Beyond
2024-03-15A comprehensive guide to how computers represent text. Understand the evolution from ASCII through Unicode, the mechanics of UTF-8 encoding, and how to handle text correctly in modern software.
File Systems and Storage Internals: How Data Persists on Disk
2023-09-22A comprehensive exploration of file system architecture, from inodes and directories to journaling and copy-on-write. Understand how operating systems organize, protect, and efficiently access persistent data.
Floating Point: How Computers Represent Real Numbers
2023-02-08A deep exploration of IEEE 754 floating point representation, the mathematics behind binary fractions, precision limits, and the subtle bugs that can arise when working with real numbers in code.
Process Scheduling and Context Switching: How Operating Systems Share the CPU
2022-05-18A deep dive into how operating systems decide which process runs next and how they switch between processes. Understand scheduling algorithms, context switches, and the trade-offs that shape system responsiveness.
Virtual Memory and Page Tables: How Operating Systems Manage Memory
2021-08-12A comprehensive exploration of virtual memory systems, page tables, address translation, and the hardware-software collaboration that enables modern multitasking. Understand TLBs, page faults, and memory protection.
CPU Caches and Memory Hierarchy: The Hidden Architecture Behind Performance
2021-06-22A deep exploration of CPU cache architecture, from L1 to L3 caches, cache lines, associativity, replacement policies, and cache coherence. Learn how memory hierarchy shapes modern software performance.
Network Sockets and the TCP/IP Stack: How Data Travels Across Networks
2020-11-08A comprehensive exploration of network programming internals, from socket system calls through the TCP/IP protocol stack to the network interface. Understand connection establishment, flow control, and the kernel's role in networking.