Murat Demirbas

If this is your introduction to Murat's blog, be sure to browse through some of the rest: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ He's been blogging about distributed systems, and papers, at an amazing rate for a long time. His paper summaries are especially interesting an insightful.

One of the sweetest Distributed Systems blogs I have ever read: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com And yes, also my favorite 101 explainer blog: https://arjunsreedharan.org

part of it https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ https://brooker.co.za/blog/ https://surfingcomplexity.blog/

Right .. the AMPLab was set up in 2011. The Djikstra prize for distributed computing was set up in 2006 .. people like Djikstra and Lamport and Jim Gray and Barbara Liskov won Turing Awards for a lifetime's worth of work. Now, Berkeley has been a fount of research on the topic, no question about that. I myself worked there (on Bloom, with Joe Hellerstein). But forgetting the other top universities of the world is a bit ... amusing? Let's take one of the many lists of foundational papers of this field: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/02/foundational-distributed-syst… How many came out of Berkeley, let alone a recent entry like the AMPLab?

It can be used to optimize consensus and transaction protocols. Consensus example - check out Nezha (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03285), they came up with an interesting 'Deadline Ordered Multicast' (DOM) primitive > DOM follows Liskov's suggestion of "depending on clock synchronization for performance but not for correctness" Transactions example - look no further than DynamoDB, https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/08/distributed-transactions-at-… > In order to relieve your anxiety before you read further, no, correctness does not depend on timestamps, clock synchronization only helps to improve performance, as more accurate clocks result in more successful transactions and a serialization order that complies with real time.

Distributed systems, database systems, writing, research, cloud computing https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

mad44 is I believe the author of the blog that OP linked, so the blog is just the OP, http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ . I don't see any direct articles about process as Murat characterizes himself as a researcher first and thus doesn't necessarily have much to say about “how do you fit this into your 9-to-5,” but he does give some reading advice, "Deep Reading", http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2022/02/deep-reading.html?m=1 "Read papers, not too much, mostly foundational ones", http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/02/read-papers-not-too-much-most…

Databases: Murat Buffalo - https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ General: Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/

The 3-pass approach mentioned in the Stanford page linked in a sibling comment is a good way to start. It's also worth knowing why you want to read a particular paper. They're usually written for communicating tersely with people "already-in-the-know" so you shouldn't expect to get much out of most papers you come across. Murat Demirbas a prof at SUNY Buffalo has described his method - http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-research-paper.htm…

For distributed systems, you might want to check out the "Murat Buffalo" blog[0] (whose actual title is "Metadata") by Murat Demirbas: From his profile[0]: I am a principal applied scientist at AWS S3 Automated Reasoning Group. On leave as a computer science and engineering professor at SUNY Buffalo. I work on distributed systems, distributed consensus, and cloud computing. [0] http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ [1] https://www.blogger.com/profile/07842046940394980130

I have many recommendations of different kinds: ## Blogs: - http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ - https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/ - https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/ - https://www.the-paper-trail.org/ - https://blog.acolyer.org/ - https://pathelland.substack.com/ ## Other web resources - https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ - set of resources from Amazon about building distributed systems - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe97RItd… - lecture series from Cambridge ## Books - https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1213/PrincComm/mfcn.pdf - A great book on the maths of networking (probability, queuing theory etc...)

Re: distsys: You might also like https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/

Here is a summary/review about it: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/06/nobody-wants-to-read-your-sh… Here is a summary/review for his earlier book: War of Art. http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/04/book-review-war-of-art-by-ste… Finally, Draft No.4 was a really good read. http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2019/03/book-review-draft-no-4-by-joh…

i think it's largely culture. academics are "graded" based on how many papers they publish. depending on your geography, quality matters too. but in most cases they aren't measured by how much non-peer reviewed publications they have. there is also a technical barrier that works both ways. most don't have the capability to have a regularly updated website with content that otherwise would have been put in the file drawer. and the other side of that coin is what audience will actually find / read it online. twitter is becoming the defacto medium of dissemination, however, so that may bode well for promoting other types of publishing medium. edit ALSO note that there are some academics who publish high-quality blogs. i'm thinking of [murat demirbas](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/). i'm not familiar with any that publish actual results, however. the threat would be someone else might "steal" the idea and publish it elsewhere, particularly in competitive fields like bio.

Relevant keynote I wrote about Formal methods won, now what? https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/04/bugbash26-keynote.html

Related blogpost: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/break-paxos.html

FWIW you might be interested in this, generalizing to many types of materialized views over increments of data via an equivalent of the chain rule over streams https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2024/11/dbsp-automatic-incremental-v…

Link seems to point to something else. Actual link: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-time-at-mit.html

"[The two generals problem] said that you can't achieve consensus (both safety and liveness at the same time), they did not say you have to sacrifice safety under message-losses or asynchrony conditions. So Paxos preserves safety under all conditions and achieves liveness when conditions improve outside the impossibility realm (less message losses, some timing assumptions start to hold)." http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2010/10/paxos-taught.html

See also: "Strict-serializability, but at what cost, for what purpose?" https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2022/08/strict-serializability-but-a…

Murat had an interesting review on a seminal queuing theory book: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/09/review-performance-modeling-a… It's surprising to me that these experts in distributed systems didn't find the book useful in practice. I was wondering if there are other similar books that are as comprehensive and deep while offering practical values as well.

The linked blog post at the top of this article - https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/01/is-scalable-oltp-in-cloud-so… - provides graphics that give extremely useful context. And here's the repo for the paper that discusses: https://github.com/DataManagementLab/ScaleStore The idea that one of many writer-compute-nodes can literally reach into a memory buffer that is shared across machines, atomically flip some lock bits and propagate some cache-coherence messages, and use that to build a multi-writer distributed database without needing to partition (and where any writer-compute-node can handle any message, so you can just round-robin a firehose of messages at them)... and that there's a chance (though not yet implemented) that one could implement ACID on top of this? It's absolute madness, and wildly exciting.

That's an interesting link, it leads to a this 1991 Liskov paper, which might seem out-of-date, but apparently was very foundational to the whole concept. A little searching turned up this modern discussion of it: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2022/11/practical-uses-of-synchroniz… Seems the bottom line is: "Since clock synchronization can fail occasionally, it is most desirable for algorithms to depend on synchronization for performance but not for correctness."

FYI the general technique Cockroach is using is commonly called Hybrid Logical Clocks, though Cloudera call their very similar idea Virtual Time as I recall. Anyhow, here's a nice summary: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2014/07/hybrid-logical-clocks.html

I read this from time to time https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/03/your-attitude-determines-you…

I just found this video: https://youtu.be/yyhMI9r0A9E and also this: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2017/11/on-dataflow-systems-naiad-and… Timely dataflow was inspired by Naiad.

Murat Demirbas has an interesting analysis that Bitcoin can be viewed as a Paxos variant with very, very expensive leader election: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/anatomical-similarities-and-…

At least one large and successful tech company uses Python for configuration: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/02/holistic-configuration-manag…

Here is a summary of the stellar consensus whitepaper http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-stellar-consensus-protoco…