Thuvarakan Tharmarajasingam

A reading list of distributed systems papers, articles, talks, and related references.

AI has made starting new things almost free, and I now have far more beginnings than finished projects. Notes on coping with the pace of change by choosing what to be good at for one season.

Why the same append-only structure keeps appearing under databases, streaming systems, replication, and filesystems, and which ordering, durability, and replay decisions actually matter.

Cheaper implementation makes everything else more expensive. Eight assumptions about working with coding agents that hold locally and break at scope.

I was using AI before I had tried to understand the task. Taking regular days away from it exposed gaps in my knowledge and improved the way I use it.

Re-reading Who Moved My Cheese as AI changes coding work, and thinking about how to adapt after years spent developing those skills.

How I use focused specifications, reviewable changes, and independent validation when working with coding agents.

How Redis 7.4 stores keys and values using dictionaries, objects, listpacks, skip lists, radix trees, and compact string encodings.

How Redis combines in-memory data, a single-threaded event loop, RESP, and client-side techniques, along with the limits of those design choices.

My promotion to Senior Software Engineer II at Wise, and why my family’s experience waiting for remittances makes the work matter to me.

What I learned from a CRM startup that built a complex microservice system before it had paying customers.

How this static site generates CSP hashes at build time, keeps content outside the script trust boundary, and works around the limits of meta delivery.

Why I moved my private notes to a static website, and how the first Astro version evolved into the current publishing build.