Interview

While prepping for interviews, I spent some time really digging into how RocksDB works — how its storage engine is designed, how data gets written, and how it gets read back. RocksDB (and the LSM-tree underneath it) is one of those things a lot of people have heard of but can’t quite explain — I couldn’t either, before I sat down with it. Once it clicked, I wrote up the core ideas as these notes, to share with anyone else trying to get it. ...

I’ve been prepping for coding interviews lately, and I went back through the sorting algorithms from scratch. The process gave me a bit of a scare: a lot of this I genuinely used to know — how quicksort’s partition actually works, why it degrades — and now I had to pause to remember it. By the time I got to the non-comparison sorts — counting, radix, bucket — I realized that whole area had become more or less a blank. ...