Apr 9Crypto WalletsA crypto wallet does not hold crypto currency! Crypto currencies are stored on the blockchain. What a wallet actually stores is a public/private key pair which is required to send and receive crypto currency. In order to send crypto currency you must sign the transaction with your private key. …Cryptocurrency3 min read
Mar 4Inventing Bitcoin Part 2Understanding How Bitcoin Works — In part one of this series we worked our way up to understanding the problem Bitcoin had to solve. In this post we will explore how Bitcoin actually solved the problem. First lets remind ourselves of the formal problem statement Bitcoin had to solve Can you come up with a…Bitcoin14 min read
Feb 21How To Invent Bitcoin Part 1Understanding the Bitcoin Problem Statement — I recently watched an awesome YouTube video about how Bitcoin actually works. This video covered the core problems that Bitcoin needed to solve in order to function as a currency and how it solved those problems. This video did not focus on making a case for the utility of Bitcoin. …Bitcoin8 min read
Jan 9The Bitcoin Standard: Book SummaryOverview The Bitcoin Standard is a popular book published in 2018 written by Saifedean Ammous. In this book Ammous explores the history of money from early forms of money up through modern fiat money and into Bitcoin. Throughout this exploration Ammous defines a set of attributes that he argues makes for…Bitcoin8 min read
Dec 4, 2021Bigtable OptimizationsHow did Bigtable make itself faster, cheaper and more reliable? — This will be my final post on Bigtable. In case you missed my earlier posts in this series I recommend you check those out before reading this post. What is Bigtable? How does Bigtable’s Control Plane Work? How does Bigtable’s Data Plane Work? This post is going to focus on…Google4 min read
Nov 28, 2021How does Bigtable’s Data Plane Work?This post is going to cover the internals of Bigtable’s data plane. If you have not followed along with my Bigtable series, there are a few posts you might want to check out before reading this. Part 1: What is Bigtable? Part 2: How does Bigtable’s Control Plane Work? This…Database4 min read
Nov 2, 2021How does Bigtable’s Control Plane Work?This post is going to cover the internals of Bigtable’s control plane. The next post in this series will cover the internals of Bigtable’s data plane. This post will assume you already have an understanding of what Bigtable is and the user facing abstractions it provides. …Database11 min read
Oct 20, 2021What is Bigtable?Bigtable is a distributed key/value storage system built at Google in 2005. It is designed to scale to store billions of rows and handle millions of reads/writes per second. This post will explore Bigtable’s data model, consistency primitives and common usages. …Columnar Databases4 min read
Sep 25, 2021How Vitess uses VReplication to Build Core FeaturesThis post dives into what VReplication is and how it gets used in Vitess. — This is the final post in my Vitess series. We have covered a lot of ground so far. We started by taking about what motivated Vitess. Then we covered an overview of the Vitess feature set and an overview of the Vitess architecture. …Sharding6 min read
Sep 16, 2021Vitess VIndexes — A Better Way to do Sharding?Why Vitess sharding is better than NoSQL sharding — One of the most magical pieces of Vitess is the clean abstractions it provides around sharding. Vitess enables the application to largely ignore the fact that data is sharded while still providing the flexibility to control how data get distributed between shards. In order to understand how Vitess managed this…Relational Databases5 min read
