The Journal

A plain tour of every feature in Narad today, from sending your first message to copying a topic across clusters. What each one is for, how it works in a sentence or two, and which earlier post tells its story.

Since the last post, Narad got about twice as fast on one machine, learned to handle hundreds of thousands of messages a second in batches, and learned to copy a topic to a whole other cluster. Here's how, in plain words, with pictures.

Fast is nice. Trustworthy is the whole point of a message broker. This is the less flashy side of Narad 3: two audits that found over a hundred problems, an outage I caused with a 24-hour certificate, soak tests that ran for days, and the boring paperwork that makes a project safe to depend on.

I benchmarked Narad against Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, Redis, and Pulsar on the same hardware, ran a Jepsen-style test on it, switched fsync to fdatasync after reading RabbitMQ's source, and got a 2x speedup that disappeared on the production cluster. Notes on what I measured and what I learned.

A CGDCT anime about girls fishing off a pier brought back my childhood summers in the village: bamboo rods, taro-stem floaters, leech bites, and my uncle who taught me all of it.

The v1.0 post ended with an honest column of three things Narad refused to claim. Four days later, one of them fell: the cluster can now rebalance and shrink itself. This is how you move the only copy of a partition between machines without losing a record, plus a CLI, a fuzz harness, and eight releases in two weeks.

Today marks five years since my first day at Razorpay, my first and only job. People keep asking how I stayed this long. I think it comes down to five rules.

A year ago I set out to build a message broker to learn distributed systems properly. Two posts ago it was a design sketch that kept turning into Kafka. Today it's v1.0: 300 million soaked messages, a chaos matrix, and a release tag I had to delete within the hour. This is the story of proving it.

Over the years, especially while working on payments systems, I have become much more cautious about code itself. Writing it is cheap. Owning it is not.

From barely surviving cardio in 2022 to squatting 120 kg, and then getting knocked flat by typhoid. Starting over, one 2.5 kg plate at a time.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how every distributed event streaming system converges on the same shape. This is about the lessons I learned standing inside that shape: the ones you can't get from a design sketch, only from the act of building.

I sat down to design a lightweight and durable message queue system from scratch, the way you do when you want to learn distributed systems properly. Every decision I made pushed me closer to the shape of Kafka. Turns out there's a perfectly good evolutionary metaphor for that.

My favourite anime movie is about an immortal girl raising a human child she'll outlive. It made me think about my mother, and everything she gave up so I could be here.

Nine shows. One grid. A small attempt to explain why each one made the cut, and why the last one is in a category of its own.

I have been writing webnovels, on and off, since 2018. I have never finished one. This is what I learned from not finishing.

A travel-comedy YouTube series about two people making each other suffer in Japan gave me something unexpected: the urge to get off my couch and go somewhere strange.

I found Laid Back Camp when I was lost and possibly depressed. Years later, after finishing season 3, I think it might be my all-time favourite anime, and I finally understand why.

A month to build, a year to actually get right. A local app that scrapes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean web novels and translates them with AI. And yes, I built it entirely for myself.

A quiet corner of the internet: an introduction to this space and the person behind it.