Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Distributed data, centralized fixes
After a week of breaches and vulnerabilities (Railway, Zeabur, eMudhra, PHP, GitLab, LiteLLM and more), Miren's Paul Hinze sorts the incidents into three structural shapes - concentrated secrets, fragmented patching and hijacked update channels - and explains how Miren's self-hostable design aims to keep data distributed while centralizing fixes.
6 min · 1,278 words
Giving Cloud Agents Production Access with OIDC, Not Secrets
Formal engineer Aditya Saligrama explains how the company lets cloud coding agents such as Cursor and Devin query production data and cloud infrastructure without long-lived secrets: the agents act as OIDC issuers, and Formal grants each session short-lived, read-only, policy-controlled and auditable access tied to the engineer, repository and run.
8 min · 1,799 words
Twelve years of distributed SQLite
rqlite creator Philip O'Toole recounts the history of distributed SQLite from rqlite's 2014 launch (Raft + SQLite) through dqlite, Litestream, LiteFS, cr-sqlite, libSQL/Turso, SQLite Cloud and Cloudflare D1, arguing the design space has three corners (consensus, streaming, merge) and that the money went to the platforms.
5 min · 1,129 words
Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes
Marc Brooker shows how LLM-built animations backed by real test traces help build intuition for distributed-systems failures, including how a Raft cluster can lose writes when one node's storage lies, and metastable failure.
2 min · 509 words
SBD: We Have a Filesystem at Home
Fly.io's Daniel Botha introduces the Sprites Block Device (SBD), a simpler object-storage-backed block device that replaces the clever custom filesystem Sprites launched with, explaining why dumber checkpoints and 'just a disk' made Sprites more reliable.
6 min · 1,282 words
The bridge to agent-scale Git infrastructure
GitHub engineers explain how they moved a copy of 99.99999% of GitHub's repositories to Azure, how per-reference quorums will bring over the rest, and how object storage lets Git reads scale independently as agent traffic grows.
7 min · 1,714 words
Cloudflare deploys protections against php2shell vulnerability
Cloudflare describes the default WAF Managed Ruleset protections it deployed for the newly disclosed php2shell PHP vulnerabilities ahead of public disclosure, how the rules detect exploitation attempts, and why customers should still update PHP while keeping the protection enabled.
5 min · 1,162 words
Postgres recovery_prefetch Considered Harmful and Causing Outages
Jeremy Schneider describes a field investigation showing that Postgres's recovery_prefetch setting can quietly cause standby replay lag and production outages, tracing it back to a concern raised on the hackers list years ago and explaining what he found.
5 min · 1,253 words
Son Luong Ngoc of BuildBuddy recaps BazelCon 26: hallway debates about deleting tests, why coding agents make CI history a blind spot for measuring tests, Uber's presence as a sign of a war for build talent, Meta's Buck2 configuration modifiers and Muse agent, and BuildBuddy's small team.
11 min · 2,472 words
Evolving the cloud-native foundation for the next generation of AI
Microsoft Azure describes how it is advancing cloud-native infrastructure so organizations can build, run, and optimize applications and agents at scale for the next generation of AI workloads.
7 min · 1,552 words
We fine-tuned a 235B model on four GPUs. Then we didn't need it.
Vertexcover's Savitha Suresh recounts fine-tuning Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking for document entity classification on four GPUs: Axolotl, Unsloth, FSDP+QLoRA and LlamaFactory setups failed before DeepSpeed ZeRO-3 with CPU offload worked, lifting F1 by 7.6 points, before newer open models made it unnecessary.
7 min · 1,541 words
Hyper Optimizing Kimi K3 in vLLM: Moving Fast and Responsibly
The vLLM team and NVIDIA describe using coding agents to build a unified CuTe DSL decode path for Kimi K3 on NVIDIA GB300, reaching over 840 tokens/s at batch 1 on 16 GPUs, and the guardrails (isolated changes, correctness tests, reproducible benchmarks) used to land agent-written kernels responsibly.
10 min · 2,277 words
Postgres DELETE Can Actually Scale
DBOS explains how Postgres actually deletes rows and how it made workflow retention deletes scale: batched deletes of the oldest workflows, dropping foreign keys so tables are cleaned in phases, debugging a 20-minute index lookup, and why it chose DELETE over dropping partitions.
7 min · 1,532 words
What changes when your search index lives on S3?
Infino explains how putting a full-text search index on object storage changes the cost and latency model: every random read is a billed GET taking tens of milliseconds, and how superfiles, manifests and careful layout keep agent queries fast without packing the working set on local disks.
9 min · 2,019 words
Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's Product Assurance team introduces Voxel, a tool that emulates a full Oxide rack, including its real control plane, switches, service processors and customer-like networking topologies, so the team can test current software without scarce hardware; it covers image creation, launch, SP emulation and the MPL 2.0 release.
18 min · 4,170 words
Everyone is doing Git on S3 wrong
Enroute explains why Git is hard to put on object storage, where write-ahead-log designs fall short, and how its Rust, Raft and S3-backed Git server, built on modern database principles, reaches 7,600+ concurrent pushes per second on a single repository, with benchmarks and an open-source 0.3.0 release.
17 min · 3,860 words
How Cogent Runs Cloud Agents Securely
Cogent's engineering team describes how it runs cloud security agents assuming the sandbox may be compromised: trusted systems outside the sandbox control credentials, network and data access while still letting agents verify their work.
7 min · 1,553 words
Building a Linearizable Log on READ COMMITTED Isolation
Materialize describes how a metastable incident under PostgreSQL SERIALIZABLE led them to build a linearizable metadata log on READ COMMITTED isolation, achieving 3x write throughput, backed by a Lean 4 proof.
20 min · 4,657 words
Why I Started Moving Inference In-House
Nicholas Reese explains why he moved the AI behind USA Arms onto in-house hardware — three servers with four AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 cards each — covering costs, the parts list, the build video, and a free build guide meant to hand to an AI.
9 min · 2,029 words
Rewinding the exponential: How we keep hardware usage down
Cloudflare’s Data team explains how it reined in an exponentially growing analytics pipeline—rewinding retention, compression, and query patterns—so hardware and cost stay sustainable while more than 20% of the web sits behind its network.
10 min · 2,215 words