Mechanical Snail is a technical blog about the parts of a system that decide whether it holds up under load: memory layout, cache behaviour, storage engines, concurrency models, and the machine learning that increasingly rides on top of them.
What you’ll find here
Every article here is a deep dive rather than a tutorial. They tend to run long, include working code, and show the measurements behind the claims — including the cases where an optimisation turned out not to pay for itself.
The recurring subject areas are:
- Performance — SIMD and vectorization, cache behaviour, memory bandwidth, and low-latency code paths.
- Storage engines — columnar layouts, time series databases, and compression.
- System design — caching strategies, distributed systems, and scalability.
- Concurrency — the Actor Model, lock-free data structures, and message passing.
- Machine learning and AI — recommendation systems, trading systems, risk management, and quantitative finance.
Most implementations are in Go or Rust, chosen because both make the cost of an abstraction visible rather than hiding it.
On accuracy
Code samples are written to compile and to be honest about their limits. Case studies are labelled as hypothetical when they are hypothetical, benchmarks state their conditions, and claims about a language runtime or an instruction set are meant to survive being checked. If you find something wrong, please say so — corrections are welcome and get applied.
Contact
- Email: sundstei@gmail.com
- GitHub: @sundstei
- RSS: index.xml