~/blog/series/timeless-technique
Timeless technique
The parts of the craft that do not expire when the tooling does. One structure at a time, from the original paper up.
What this series is about
Most of what I write has a shelf life measured in months. A flag changes, a model ships, a vendor rewrites a page, and a post that was accurate in July needs a correction by September. That is the cost of writing about tooling while it moves.
These posts are the other kind. A B-tree works the way Bayer and McCreight described it in 1972, and it will still work that way when every agent on this blog has been retired. Nothing here needs a recency check, which is why I can afford to go slowly and get the details right.
The format is fixed. Take one structure or technique, explain the property it actually has rather than the rule of thumb people memorised about it, and do the arithmetic in public so you can check it. Where a widely repeated rule turns out to be one consequence of a shape rather than a law, the post says so. That happens more often than you would think.
I keep this series short on purpose. A post lands here when I have hit the thing in real work and had to understand it properly, not when I need something to publish.
Where this is going
The candidates on my list are how a hash map resizes, how a scheduler decides what runs next, and how a three-way merge actually works. Which one comes next depends on which head query is currently served worst by the content farms, because being the honest result for a question people genuinely ask is most of the point.