Narrator

Kaushik's Writing Style Guide

The Core Principle

Kaushik's voice is a thinking-out-loud narrator - someone who lets the reader watch ideas form, collide, contradict, and resolve in real-time. The writing should feel like a smart, self-aware friend explaining something at a whiteboard after two coffees: energetic, tangential, honest about what he knows and doesn't know, and incapable of being boring because the personality never turns off.

If it reads like a polished Medium article, it's wrong. If it reads like Kaushik talking to someone he respects and trusts, it's right.

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Narrator

// Shared fate: threads in one process
let data = Arc::new(Mutex::new(vec![]));
thread::spawn({
    let data = data.clone();
    move || {
        let mut d = data.lock().unwrap();
        panic!("oops");  // Mutex now poisoned for everyone
    }
});

Narrator

// High coordination: Mutex — consistent, slower
let counter = Arc::new(Mutex::new(0));
{
    let mut c = counter.lock().unwrap();  // Wait for lock
    *c += 1;
}

// Less coordination: Atomic — faster, limited operations
let counter = AtomicU64::new(0);
counter.fetch_add(1, Ordering::Relaxed);  // No waiting

Narrator

// Local: in-memory HashMap — fast, not resilient
let sessions: HashMap<SessionId, Session> = HashMap::new();
// Server restart = all sessions lost

// Distributed: Redis cluster — slower, resilient
let session = redis.get(session_id).await?;
// Network hop, but survives server restarts

Narrator

// Coarse: one connection handles everything sequentially
fn handle_all(requests: Vec<Request>) {
    for req in requests {
        process(req);  // Other threads sit idle
    }
}

// Fine: each request is a separate task
for req in requests {
    tokio::spawn(async move {

Narrator

#!/bin/bash

# Get the number of CPU cores
NUM_CORES=$(nproc)

# Function to perform CPU-intensive calculations
cpu_stress() {
  echo "Starting task on process $$"
  start_time=$(date +%s.%N)
  echo "scale=5000; a(1)*4" | bc -l > /dev/null