Archive - aspiring.dev

We need more databases

It feels like over recent years, a “database consolidation” has been happening.

Aug 10 •

May 2025

Ah yes, agentic phishing, excellent

I recently got this email screenshot from my co-founder:

May 15 •

December 2024

The not so secret way to pay for faster AI inference

Look at this chart, this is a synthetic test running the prompt "say exactly 'Hello, world!'" 300 times for Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2:

Dec 17, 2024 •

November 2024

Representing filesystems in databases efficiently with Hierarchical Ordering

Or: A new way to sort strings

Nov 16, 2024 •

The most important part of a distributed system: Time

The most important part of distributed systems, and often the bane of the distributed system engineer’s career.

Nov 15, 2024 •

September 2024

Notes: LLMs don't know what they are talking about

Thoughts as of August 11th 2024 on the capabilities and limitations of LLMs

Sep 15, 2024 •

June 2024

BulkUnsubscribe: Unsubscribe from all marketing emails in 1-click

Using the List-Unsubscribe header standard to finally get rid of all that junk

Jun 16, 2024 •

April 2024

Finding Trends With Approximate Embedding Clustering

Clustering vectors by similarity is a powerful method to identify trends and categories of a dataset, frequently used in analytics (like identifying…

Apr 29, 2024 •

March 2024

Range Partitioning: Zero to One

Of the many partitioning methods used to build distributed systems, range partitioning (dividing data into logical key ranges), is quickly becoming the…

Mar 17, 2024 •

How To Build AWS-Compatible APIs: AWS Sigv4

Nearly all requests that touch an AWS service like S3, DynamoDB, and the entire AWS API use AWS Sigv4 authentication.

Mar 1, 2024 •

February 2024

Building a Fly.io-like Scheduler Part 2: Resource Requirements and Multi-Region

In our the last post, we built a simple coordinator and a worker that could increment a number from a client request.

Feb 26, 2024 •

Building a Fly.io-like Scheduler Part 1: Basic Coordinator and Workers

Fly.io has built a very cool platform, allowing for super quick allocation and destruction of compute.

Feb 23, 2024 •

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