independent engineering notes / 2025
Deep dives into distributed systems, databases, and Go — with interactive visualizers you can actually play with.
01 / the library
The log on disk, consumer group assignment, eager vs cooperative rebalancing, ISR and the high watermark, log compaction, and exactly-once — seven interactive visualizers for the Kafka internals that decide how production behaves.
What actually happens when you INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE rows — MVCC, dead tuples, autovacuum, and the cost-based query planner explained with interactive visualizers.
Step through how consistent hashing distributes keys across nodes, handles node additions and removals, and why it beats modulo hashing for distributed caches.
Watch leader election, log replication, and network partitions play out step by step in this visual walk-through of the Raft consensus algorithm.