Engineering field notes.

Long-form architecture arguments and practical engineering essays grounded in real systems. The emphasis is on boundaries, evidence, tradeoffs, and the conditions that make a design worth its cost.

Architecture series

Black Skies

9 parts · complete

Nine parts on consistency boundaries, tile ownership, delivery fanout, ship AI, benchmark design, and falsifiers. The development record lives at the Black Skies hub.

01Thesis

Start here

10,000 Players, No Time Dilation

Why consistency versus availability is a design choice, and how game rules become scaling decisions. The hub of the series.

“The trick is not a faster server. It is recognizing that consistency and availability are a design choice, not just an infrastructure one.”
Design argument 11 min read
  1. Part 2 of 9: The Life of a Tile Lifecycle, failover, and garbage collection. Design note 14 min
  2. Part 3 of 9: Redis Coordination for Real-Time Tile State Commit, delivery, and durability on the 500 ms tick. Design note 14 min
  3. Part 4 of 9: Split-Brain Resolution Without a Global Coordinator Epoch fencing without a global coordinator. Design note 12 min
  4. Part 5 of 9: Delivering One Battle to 10,000 Clients Fanout, correctness, and the 600-byte budget. Design note 9 min
  5. Part 6 of 9: Motion Across Boundaries Authority transfer and combat at the seam. Design note 21 min
  6. Part 7 of 9: The Substrate Tiles Never Think About Leases, refill speeds, and Lambda as a bridge. Design note 10 min
  7. Part 8 of 9: The Autopilot Shares the Wheel Decision decks, newest state, and shared control. Design note 10 min

09Evidence

Evidence ledger

What Still Needs Load Testing

The full benchmark table, the two SLIs that define correctness, and exactly what would falsify the design.

Benchmarks & falsifiers 11 min read

Active project

PlotWarden

1 article

A system for keeping ratified intent, evidence-backed reality, and active AI development work aligned while all three are changing.