Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

Systems researcher. All views my own. maheshba.bitbucket.io Joined March 2008

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Mike Freedman @michaelfreedman

3 weeks ago

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.” - Alan Perlis The new semester just started at @Princeton, and I'm teaching distributed systems again. What I tell my students in the first lecture: A central goal of software systems is to…

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Xiangyao Yu @xiangyao_yu

4 weeks ago

Honored to receive the #VLDB2025 Early Career Award this year. Grateful to @wiscdb, my students, collaborators, mentors, and family for making this journey possible. Excited to keep pushing the boundaries of database systems! Paper: vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p5…

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

3 months ago

TIL chain replication in OSDI 2004 does not have a test of time award. Maybe the test of time award is failing the test of time.

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Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas

3 months ago

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Ankush Desai @ankushpd

5 months ago

I would highly recommend reading this article. It talks about two types of 10x engineers. For managers it’s important to identify these engineers and appreciate them for who they are and also as engineers its important to know what you want to be and enjoy doing. Ferrari or a…

Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

5 months ago

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

5 months ago

[new blog post] On the two types of 10x engineers: I entirely blame @muratdemirbas for encouraging me to write this up. maheshb.net/blog/2025/04/2…

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Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires

6 months ago

You can just do things.

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martin_casado @martin_casado

6 months ago

Honestly I feel like we're currently in a bit of CS dark ages where all our mental energy goes into working around shit design decisions of third party software. Total fucking waste of time.

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John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack

6 months ago

I have never seen it expressed exactly like that, but I wholeheartedly endorse it: Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”.

Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_

6 months ago

I have never seen it expressed exactly like that, but I wholeheartedly endorse it: Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”.

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

6 months ago

I wonder when we’ll start seeing “vibe-design”

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

7 months ago

in system design, nothing is more important than establishing a starting vocabulary for describing the problem and space of solutions (echoing wittgenstein: "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world").

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

7 months ago

System design has a core tenet that “complex things can be made simple with abstraction”. To a non-systems person, the complexity seems unavoidable, so often they just want you to get on with the job of shoveling the crap, instead of studying it contemplatively.

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

7 months ago

“nightmare bicycle” is a great name for a failure mode that happens all the time in software interfaces.

Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt

7 months ago

“nightmare bicycle” is a great name for a failure mode that happens all the time in software interfaces.

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Ankush Desai @ankushpd

7 months ago

If you are looking for formal models of a real-world distributed system, DeepSeek @deepseek_ai released P specifications for their new distributed file system (3FS): github.com/deepseek-ai/3F…

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

7 months ago

CRAQ (by @michaelfreedman and jeff terrace) is an elegant extension of chain replication (by robbert van renesse and fred schneider, two giants of distributed systems); nice to see it show up in the DeepSeek stack!

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John Ousterhout @JohnOusterhout

7 months ago

As you may know, I have significant disagreements with @unclebobmartin about the software design advice in his book "Clean Code". He and I recently discussed some of these issues, and a transcript of the discussion is available at github.com/johnousterhout….

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Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas

7 months ago

[new blog post] Entrepreneurs think and act differently from managers and strategists. Some people are born entrepreneurs. Maybe you can teach it. Maybe you can't. But some minds thrive in uncertainty and make it up as they go. Others crave a plan, a map, a well-paved road.

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Mahesh Balakrishnan @maheshb

7 months ago

Whenever I get overwhelmed by a complex system, I remind myself that it’s sometimes good to be just a little bit dumb / lazy. Instead of “How does this thing work?”, the systems way is to ask: “Can I find a way to ignore how this thing works?”

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Jack Vanlightly @vanlightly

7 months ago

I updated my How to Disaggregate a Log Replication Protocol to include "separating ordering from IO". Basically I couldn't ignore CORFU as a way of separating responsibilities! So now we have A-F of ways of breaking apart the monolith. jack-vanlightly.com/blog/2025/2/10…