Small businesses today face mounting concerns about their dependence on Big Tech platforms. Rising subscription costs, unpredictable policy changes, data privacy concerns, and vendor lock-in create real risks for organizations trying to maintain control over their operations. In 2024, we’ve …
As systems architects, we often find ourselves pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with virtualization and emulation. While hardware-accelerated virtualization like KVM gets a lot of attention, there’s an unsung hero that enables QEMU’s incredible flexibility: the Tiny Code …
I learned the importance of backups the hard way in 2012 when my laptop’s hard drive died with three years of family photos and my graduate thesis. I lost everything—a mistake that cost me hundreds of hours trying to recover data and caused genuine emotional pain from losing irreplaceable …
The recent buzz on Hacker News about “Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden” has rightly captured the attention of systems architects and developers like us. It’s a compelling analogy, suggesting that while we observe incremental, steady improvements in AI, we might …
When I started working with distributed systems fifteen years ago, one of my first production incidents was caused by clock drift. A simple five-second difference between servers caused duplicate transactions, corrupted data, and hours of debugging. That experience taught me to take time …
Alright, fellow tech enthusiasts, gather ‘round! Who here remembers the thrill of squeezing every last drop of performance out of ancient hardware? Or perhaps you’ve been in that nail-biting situation, staring at a corrupted hard drive, praying for a lifeline? If so, you’re …
After spending 8 years as a network administrator supporting over 2,000 users, I’ve resolved countless DNS problems. The good news? Most DNS issues have simple fixes that take less than 5 minutes. Just last month, I helped my neighbor who thought her internet was “completely …
One often encounters scenarios in production environments where the computational and memory footprint of an operating system becomes a critical, limiting factor. This is particularly true within the burgeoning domains of embedded systems, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and specialized edge …
Wow, what a week, folks! Just when we thought we’d caught our breath from the mid-November Cloudflare incident, December 5th, 2025, decided to throw another wrench into the internet’s gears. I mean, seriously, it feels like we’re playing a high-stakes game of Jenga with the …
When I migrated a global e-commerce platform to use a CDN in 2018, page load times dropped from 4.2 seconds to 0.9 seconds on average—a 76% improvement. More importantly, conversion rates increased by 23% because fast websites convert better. After 15 years architecting web infrastructure for sites …