Post

If 2026 is the year of AI, it's also the year to read more papers. LLMs make writing code cheaper. This places greater emphasis on architectural choices, understanding design tradeoffs, ensuring security, and building things people actually need. Great example: yesterday I read the Dynamo paper.

Merkle trees, consistent hashing, vector clocks, gossip protocols, and quorum algorithms were all previously known and had been used to build other software. But their unique combination to build Dynamo worked super well for Amazon's use-case, and helped them to scale to millions of DAU.