The Engineer’s Notebook

I Thought Connection Pooling Was About Caching. It's About Framing Protocols and Synchronization Knobs.

Why knowing when a response ends is only half the problem — the other half is controlling bursts, memory, and server load with semaphores and mutexes?

May 10 • Vishal Govind

Go's Netpoller Handles Millions of Connections. But Connections Still Aren't Free.

A deep dive into TCP connection lifecycle, how Go's netpoller parks goroutines instead of blocking threads, and why connection pools exist.

May 3 • Vishal Govind

April 2026

I Thought Logging Was One Line Until I Saw the Cost of Serialization Through Buffer Pooling

Concurrent writes corrupt logs. Mutex bottlenecks serialize work. Buffer pooling reveals what serialization actually costs

Apr 23 • Vishal Govind

HTTP Deep Dive - HTTP File Upload: Memory Flow, SSE Progress, and Token Bucket Rate Limiting

Understanding where upload data lives in RAM on it's way to disk, how HTTP SSE streams work, and how can a token bucket control data flow at the Go's…

Apr 18 • Vishal Govind

Building Trust on the Internet — Part 3: SSH's Two-Keypair Authentication

I've SSHed into EC2 instances dozens of times. But I never understood what that fingerprint prompt was actually checking, or why it mattered.

Apr 11 • Vishal Govind

Building Trust on the Internet — Part 2: AWS IAM and AWS STS

TLS told me the server is who it claims to be. Inside AWS, a different question takes over — who is the caller, and what are they allowed to do?

Apr 7 • Vishal Govind

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That Tiny 'i' in GiB Had Me Confused All Along

Why RAM is GiB, storage is GB, and network is Gigabit

Apr 3 • Vishal Govind

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March 2026

Building Trust on the Internet — Part 1: From First Principles to HTTPS

How does a browser securely talk to a server it has never met before over a network that anyone can intercept?

Mar 26 • Vishal Govind

December 2025

Concurrency in Go Feels More Like Organizing People Than Using Threads

A human way to understand go-routines, scheduling, and work stealing

Dec 25, 2025 • Vishal Govind

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I Thought Go Concurrency Was About Speed — I Was Wrong

Concurrency made my server more available, not faster.

Dec 21, 2025 • Vishal Govind

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