Replication 101

This substack is to detail my experiences with imposter syndrome. The goal is for both you (the reader) and me to learn more about tech together.

Apr 8 • Ali

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March 2026

How OpenAI Serves 800 Million Users Without Sharding Postgres

This substack is to detail my experiences with imposter syndrome. The goal is for both you (the reader) and me to learn more about tech together.

Mar 31 • Ali

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Start Here — A Guide to Professional Imposter Syndrome

New here? This is the best way to read the blog.

Mar 21 • Ali

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Beyond "Pick Two": Real-World Trade Offs

Why most systems live between CP and AP and how to choose where yours belongs.

Mar 17 • Ali

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February 2026

AP Systems Explained: Stale Data Beats Dead Servers

How DynamoDB, Cassandra, and DNS stay available during network failures—and how they clean up the mess afterward.

Feb 24 • Ali

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CP Systems Explained: The Hidden Cost of Strong Consistency

Let's look at what CP systems actually do under the hood when they choose consistency over availability.

Feb 3 • Ali

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January 2026

CAP Theorem Explained: Beyond the "Pick Two" Myth

Let's get to the bottom of what Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance actually mean in production distributed systems.

Jan 20 • Ali

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February 2025

Cryptography for Software Developers

In this post I'll provide software developers with what I think is necessary information regarding cryptography and security.

Feb 5, 2025 • Ali

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November 2024

The Rise of Edge Computing

Bringing computing closer to data sources and ultimately the customer.

Nov 4, 2024 • Ali

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October 2024

Merkle Trees 101....continued

Today we'll be implementing Merkle Trees. This is building upon the last post.

Oct 9, 2024 • Ali

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September 2024

Merkle Trees 101

Today we're going to take a in-depth look at Merkle Trees, a fundamental data structure in the field of cryptography and an exhaustively used one in the…

Sep 26, 2024 • Ali

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Computer Networks 101 (#2)

For this weeks post we'll be taking a deep dive in to computer networks. Specifically the OSI and TCP/IP stacks and how it relates to modern networking.

Sep 17, 2024 • Ali

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