Alex's Tech Notes

Thoughts on software, systems, and the internet.

On Building Reliable Distributed Systems

March 2, 2025

After spending the better part of a decade building distributed systems, I have come to appreciate that the hardest problems are not technical—they are about understanding failure modes that only emerge at scale.

The CAP theorem is often cited but rarely internalized. In practice, most systems do not neatly fall into CP or AP categories. They exist on a spectrum, and the real engineering challenge is understanding where your specific use case sits on that spectrum.

Why I Switched to SQLite for Small Projects

February 15, 2025

For years, I defaulted to PostgreSQL for everything. It is a fantastic database. But for small projects—personal tools, side projects, prototypes—it is overkill. SQLite has become my go-to, and here is why.

The simplicity of a single-file database that requires zero configuration is hard to overstate. No connection pooling, no user management, no separate process to monitor. Just your application and a file.