I really enjoy these focused topic technical books. They're much more digestible than the typical 500 page tomes that dominate technical bookshelves. This book is divided into three parts. The first part lays the foundation with basic latency principles and definitions, the second part covers how to optimize data placement for latency, and the third covers software techniques for reducing latency. The code examples are in Rust, which added a little more cognitive overhead (as I have not picked up Rust at the time that I write this), but weren't too difficult to follow. I was hoping for a little more coverage of queing theory, but the content leans into practice. This book excels at promoting systems thinking for latency, which I think is important in the agentic coding era (at least as the state of the art exists today). I certainly recommend "Latency" to anyone developing performance sensitive applications
Sprandom is a clever new preconditioning method proposed by the team at Sandisk. It can emulate fully random preconditioning in more-or-less a single pass of writes over an SSD. This is hugely important for high capacity QLC SSDs (128TB+) where traditional preconditioning methods take days to complete. I was able to test it on a smaller capacity TLC device to see how it performed. The results are published on the ScaleFlux blog linked below. In short, even for more modest capacity (and high performance) TLC drives, the results are impressive. We saw a 50% reduction in preconditioning time on a 7.68TB drive.
This is the start of my personal website. I created this after attending a workshop by Donn Felker on agentic coding. The workshop challenges you to create a project without using a single line of hand coding. In my case, this was easy as I have not worked on anything in a browser since it was common to write your own HTML and style sheets. It has been an extremeley useful exercise to get hands on with Claude Code, but I also look forward to having a small platform for sharing things that maybe I wouldn't on platforms like LinkedIn.
