Exploring How Systems Work

During my college days I got really curious about how the bigger systems we all use actually work, and why they are built the way they are. A lot of this happened as part of a team activity at the Mission R&D bootcamp, where instead of just reading about these systems, we tried building small versions of them ourselves.

That turned into a few different experiments:

• We built a compiler and worked through how a basic compiler goes from source code to something runnable, so parsing and code generation stopped being magic.
• We built a SQLite-like database to understand what is actually happening inside one: how the query engine works, how data gets stored on disk and read back, and the general internals of a database.
• We explored multithreading, and got a real feel for how powerful it is for doing things concurrently, and how genuinely tricky it is to get right.

None of these were meant to be products. They were pure learning and experimentation, and building the small versions taught me far more about how the real ones work than any amount of reading would have. A lot of the intuition I still use for reasoning about performance, storage, and concurrency started here.

How you can use it

It is organized as a set of explorations (a compiler, a database, a filesystem, and multithreading experiments), so it is a decent place to poke around if you are curious about systems internals. The repo has each piece in its own folder.