Where does my computer get the time from?

Where does my computer get the time from? From NTP, but where does NTP get the time from?

Rapidly create custom browser mods (sponsor)

Stop creating yet another screen. PixieBrix is the first low-code platform to add automation, integrations, collaboration, and AI to the web apps your teams already use.

Hints for Distributed Systems Design

These are collective products of distributed systems researchers and practitioners over many decades.

Storage Challenges in the Evolution of Database Architecture

Learn how Postman engineers solved a physical storage issue in the database layer of the service behind Postman Collections.

MMO Architecture: Source of truth, Dataflows, I/O bottlenecks and how to solve them

As much as it may seem that such an application fits perfectly in what we would unconsciously consider “distributed architectures“, the specific details (small and large) of this kind of solutions turn what, for any capable engineer would be a simple design process into a headache of biblical proportions.

50 years later, is two-phase Locking the best we can do?

Turns out no, we can do better. Two-Phase Locking has several advantages over the other concurrency controls that have since been invented, but in my view there are two important ones: simplicity and a strong isolation level.