About

I'm Alex — a backend engineer. I spend most of my days writing Go, keeping PostgreSQL happy, and arguing with Linux about why a service won't start. This site is where I keep notes: the things I looked up once, understood for an afternoon, and wanted a record of before I forgot them again.

I've worked mostly on the unglamorous parts of systems — APIs, job queues, data pipelines, the plumbing that doesn't get a landing page. That's the work I enjoy. A query that drops from 900 ms to 70 is a better afternoon than almost anything with a UI.

What you'll find here

Short, practical write-ups, usually triggered by something that bit me at work:

• Go — profiling, concurrency, the standard library, and the occasional sharp edge.
• Databases — mostly PostgreSQL. Query plans, indexing, connection pooling.
• Linux & DevOps — systemd, the shell, the small operational details that make a server pleasant to run.

No tutorials-for-the-sake-of-traffic, no listicles. If I wrote it down, it's because I needed it and couldn't find a straight answer.

Elsewhere & contact

The best way to reach me is email: alex at this domain. I read everything, though I'm slow to reply. If you spotted a mistake in a post, I especially want to hear it — I'd rather fix a wrong note than leave it misleading someone.

There's an RSS feed if you want new posts without a middleman. That's the only way to subscribe; I don't run a newsletter and there's no tracking on this site — no analytics, no third-party scripts, nothing loaded from anywhere but this server.

Opinions here are my own and tend to change as I learn more. If a post is old, treat it as a snapshot of what I thought at the time.