@snehasishroy

The String That Should Never Have Existed

3d ago · 7 min read · Somewhere in a production system, a random string was born. It looked innocent. A transaction ID embedded in a metric name. A session token baked into a log field. A request hash used as an analytics

Introducing AtomDB - A Strongly Consistent, Embedded KeyValue Database built from scratch

Mar 21 · 17 min read · Over the past 1 year, I was working on an itch to build something - not to just vibe code - but to actually understand the primitives and build something useful. I thought, what better way to understa

Shuffle Sharding - the secret sauce behing AWS reliability

Jun 8, 2025 · 6 min read · In a typical client-server architecture, requests from the client are forwarded to a random Application Server by the Application Load Balancer. When the request is a poison pill i.e. it crashes/hungs the server receiving the request, then all of you...

Building a Request Coalescer from Scratch

May 20, 2025 · 5 min read · Let’s say you’re building a backend service. Things are going great — until traffic picks up. Suddenly, you notice something odd. You’re seeing multiple identical requests hitting your database or API. They all ask for the same thing and they all mak...

Understanding the basics of Kafka Binary Protocol

May 19, 2025 · 8 min read · Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform used for high-performance data pipelines. In this article, we will take a look at the under belly of the Kafka and see how communication happens between the Kafka client and server. Fundamentals ...