About

About

Hey! I’m Tisan Das, a software engineer on a journey to design large-scale distributed systems.

Over the years I’ve worked on multiple products with varying stacks — from a small component that generates queries, to a high-performance component handling data streams, to building with cloud services. Along the way I realized the necessity of taking notes: this blog is my attempt to pen down the concepts I study, sharpen my understanding, and hone the skill of explaining them.

I welcome you to have a glimpse of the journey. If you find something interesting, or want to discuss an idea, I’m always happy to talk.

What you’ll find here

Prefer a guided path? Start on the Series page — reading tracks plus every multi-part series in order.

  • Distributed Systems — consensus (Raft, PBFT), replication, distributed file systems, and notes on classic papers (GFS, DynamoDB, Aurora, Bitcoin…)
  • Databases — PostgreSQL internals and isolation, LSM trees, and chapter-by-chapter notes on Designing Data-Intensive Applications
  • System Design — case studies: rate limiter, consistent hashing, key-value store, URL shortener, web crawler, notification system
  • Algorithms — problem sets in C++: binary trees, binary search, BFS, union-find, sliding window
  • Security — the web security series: XSS, CSRF, XXE, injection, DoS
  • Deep Learning — neural network fundamentals, RNNs, LLMs and RAG
  • Cloud & DevOps — Docker, Kubernetes, NGINX, AWS, HashiCorp stack

Elsewhere