muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP

The Aurora DSQL paper finally dropped . Reading it yesterday was an interesting experience, because I spent two years (2022-23) working with...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Characterizing Metastable Faults and Failures

Metastability has been studied in previous work as a self-sustaining degradation in goodput that persists even after the trigger is gone. T...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Leaving Buffalo: A Move-ing Story

Moving is not for the faint of heart! The surgeon general should issue a warning against moving houses after age 50 . Coordinating our cross...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

5 Lessons at 50

Looking at my peak male physique, and my Keanu Reeves baby face, you would never suspect it, but I recently turned 50. As is the tradition, ...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Our Collective Bike Shed Moment

In 1957, Parkinson postulated his "Law of Triviality" using a fictitious committee reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. The reactor d...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Our Italy trip

We spent 10 days in Italy in early April. It was a lot of fun. Back when I was a grad student, I stayed in Pisa for a month for a "summer sc...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Our MongoDB TLA+ Workshop

Shortly after I joined MongoDB research, we ran a TLA+ workshop. It was a two-day ordeal. We had a 1.5 days of instruction on TLA+ and synta...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools

The transformative power of LLMs in coding has been irrefutable, and it feels like we are living through a magical computing renaissance. On...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

A Case for Simulation-Driven Resilience in Agentic Data Systems

As I mentioned in my previous post , I traveled to San Jose at the end of May for the ACM CAIS conference. On Day 0, I gave a very short tal...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

ACM CAIS: Conference on AI and Agentic Systems

Last week, I traveled to San Jose to attend the ACM CAIS conference . On Day 0, I gave a short talk at the Supporting our AI Overlords (SAO)...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Chess invariants

Chess is a lot trickier than it looks. It has so many rules: castling, en passant, pawn promotion, pinning, the discovered check, and the de...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Book review: The Thinking Machine

I listened to this book as an audiobook through the Libby app, which basically brings your public library to your phone. The Thinking Machin...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

The Two Abstractions of System Design: Hide or Reduce

When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

BugBash'26: Day 2

Ok, finally getting sometime to put my butt down to write about day 2 of BugBash. Why do so few buildings fall down? Brian Potter, Senior In...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

BugBash'26 Afternoon of Day 1

These are my notes from the afternoon sessions of BugBash'26 . We had a 75 minute lunch break. Nice lunch, but there were no vegetarian entr...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Antithesis BugBash Conference 2026

Notes from the 2026 conference on autonomous testing and software correctness.

emptysqua.re

BugBash'26 Morning of Day 1

Continuing with notes from the BugBash talks. Yes, all of this goodness, including Will Wilson's keynote was before lunch the first day. Wh...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

BugBash'26 Keynote

I attended the BugBash 2026 these last two days, and had a blast. Here are my notes from the first keynote. I will try to find time to publ...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

OSTEP Chapter 14: Interlude -- Memory API

This is a short chapter covering the nuts and bolts of memory allocation in C: malloc(), free(), and the many ways programmers get them wro...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

PolitePaxos: A New Consensus Variant Where the Proposer Just Asks Nicely

Paxos consensus protocol, despite its many theoretical virtues, is fundamentally rude. One need only look at the way it behaves to see the p...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks

This paper from METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) introduces a new metric for tracking AI progress: the "50%-task-completion time h...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

OSTEP Chapter 13: The Abstraction of Address Spaces

Chapter 13 of OSTEP provides a primer on how and why modern operating systems abstract physical hardware. This is part of our series going t...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

SysMoBench: Evaluating AI on Formally Modeling Complex Real-World Systems

This paper presents SysMoBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate generative AI's ability to formally model complex concurrent and distribute...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

TLA+ mental models

In the age of LLMs, syntax is no longer the bottleneck for writing, reading, or learning TLA+. People are even getting value by generating T...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Break Paxos

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I recently got my hands on Claude Code. In the morning, I used it to build a  Hybrid Logical Clock...

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com