About

I’m Sam De Roeck, a software engineer interested in database engines, distributed consensus, storage systems, and the boundaries where their clean abstractions start leaking.

This site is for careful, implementation-oriented writing: the kind that begins with an invariant, follows it into real code, and keeps going until the trade-offs are visible.

#How the site is built

The articles are Markdown files in Git. A small Rust program parses their typed front matter, renders Markdown with pulldown-cmark, and sends fenced code through Arborium’s Tree-sitter grammars. It emits static HTML, RSS, Atom, and a sitemap for Cloudflare Pages.

There is no production database, editor dashboard, or client-side application framework. The publishing system is intentionally smaller than the systems described by it.

#What to expect

• Storage-engine anatomy, from page layouts through compaction
• Transactions, recovery, and replication protocols
• Close readings of interesting database implementations
• Experiments that connect performance measurements to design choices