The Pip Reading RoomNo. 6
CursorAugust 2026
Git at any scale
Vicent Martí
Three copies voting on every push, or one log that refuses stale writers. Guess which one sleeps through the night.
For software engineers · iPhone & Android beta
Systems, told as stories.
Real history, live simulations you can break, and the papers that fixed them.
Distributed systems
How a chapter goes
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1 A real moment in history
Each chapter opens on the day a problem was real: who was building what, where, and what went wrong.
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2 Break the rule on the blackboard
Try the obvious idea in a live simulation. Slow a message, kill a computer, cut the network, and watch it fail.
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3 What they published
Then the real solution, why it holds, and the paper that named it, with the sections worth reading.
Play a chapter
Consensus, chapter 1. This board runs Pip’s own simulator in your browser: every value and every message is from the run.
1978 SRI International · NASA
NASA wants computers to fly a plane. SRI’s design, SIFT, runs three side by side, each with its own altimeter. They must agree on one altitude.
1980 Pease, Shostak and Lamport, Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults: the same vote, even when computers lie.
tap the slow message to hold it back
The library
37 books, one problem each, told from the year it first bit someone. Tap a spine to take it down.
How models learn
OS fundamentals
Networking
Distributed systems
AI systems
Data systems
The reading room
Engineering posts worth your evening, each turned into one playable chapter: read the post, then break the thing it describes.
The Pip Reading RoomNo. 5
MetaJuly 2026
Modernizing the Meta Ads Service With an Open-Source Kernel Scheduler
Blaise Sanouillet, Sunyi Shao, Jeff Song, Gosh Arzumanyan, Shawn Wu, Tejun Heo, Praveen Sampath, GP Musumeci
Sixty years of scheduling research, and the winning move is still knowing which thread is the important one.
The Pip Reading RoomNo. 4
DatabricksJune 2026
From monolith to Lakebase to LTAP: rethinking the database from storage up
Reynold Xin
Postgres used to own its disk. Now it keeps a cache and lets the log hold the receipts.
The Pip Reading RoomNo. 3
AnthropicApril 2026
Scaling Managed Agents: Decoupling the brain from the hands
Lance Martin, Gabe Cemaj, Michael Cohen
A container you nurse back to health is a pet. Write everything down in the log and you can let it go.
The Pip Reading RoomNo. 2
CursorMarch 2026
Fast regex search: indexing text for agent tools
Vicent Marti
Fifteen seconds a grep, a grep every turn. The index is cheaper than the waiting.
The Pip Reading RoomNo. 1
Strange LoopSeptember 2014
Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation
Will Wilson
Don't chase the bug through the real world. Build a smaller world where it has to come back when you call.
A chapter in a minute
Shorts drawn from real runs of the simulator. More every week on YouTube and TikTok.
1975Two generals, one messengeron the board soon
2023An OS inside the inference serveron the board soon
Chapters in a minute
They play quietly as they scroll by. Tap one for sound.
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1978 Three computers, one altitude
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1975 Two generals, one messenger
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2023 An OS inside the inference server
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1978 Whose clock is right?
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