// curious hound

// field notes

Curious Hound

Not every Short needs a longer read. But some topics are too big to fit in sixty seconds — when a Short only scratches the surface, the full write-up lands here.

  1. 06 algorithms · September 8, 2026 How the Kalman Filter Lands Mars Rovers When Every Sensor Lies A plain-English walkthrough of the Kalman Filter with real numbers: how spacecraft and smartphones find their true position when sensors fail.
  2. 05 databases · August 21, 2026 Why Your Analytics Query Reads a Hundred Million Rows in Two Seconds (Columnar Storage Explained) How columnar databases skip the data you didn't ask for, compress what's left, and turn a ten-minute scan into a two-second answer.
  3. 04 system design · August 21, 2026 Why Your Checkout Freezes When the Boss Runs a Report (and How CQRS Fixes It) A plain-English walkthrough of CQRS: why one database serving both orders and reports makes checkout hang, and how splitting reads from writes fixes it.
  4. 03 databases · August 21, 2026 How LSM Trees Turn a Million Random Writes into One Calm, Sequential Stream How LSM trees convert expensive random disk writes into fast sequential ones using a memtable, sorted files, and background compaction.
  5. 02 compilers · August 21, 2026 How a Compiler Trick Lets You Recurse Ten Thousand Times Without Crashing How tail call optimization rewrites recursion into a loop behind the scenes, reusing one stack frame instead of stacking ten thousand.
  6. 01 databases · August 21, 2026 Why Your Bank Transfer Survives a Power Cut (Write-Ahead Logging Explained) How write-ahead logging protects your data when the power dies mid-transaction, and why every serious database from PostgreSQL to SQLite uses it.