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Julian Vance
Systems & Storage Engine Engineer โข Distributed Systems Architect โข Open-Source Tinkerer
Hi there! I am Julian, a systems engineer obsessed with low-latency storage engines, deterministic consensus models, and low-level Linux performance optimization. Over the past decade, I have been designing infrastructure that operates reliably when the network fails and disk queues back up.
Outside of distributed primitives, I spend my weekends soldering Eurorack synthesizer modules, studying cold-war era telecommunications hardware, and restoring vintage mechanical keyboards.
๐ญ Active Work & Open-Source Projects
| Project | Role / Scope | Primary Stack | Highlights |
|---|---|---|---|
keg-db |
Author & Maintainer | Rust, io_uring, SIMD |
Embedded, crash-resilient LSM-tree storage engine tailored for NVMe drives with lock-free memtables and zero-copy block compaction. |
wirefall |
Lead Contributor | C, eBPF, Go, XDP | In-kernel high-throughput packet telemetry and rate-limiting pipeline running sub-microsecond filtering on 100GbE edge links. |
raft-sim |
Author | Rust, TLA+ | Deterministic discrete-event simulation testbed for Raft consensus under asymmetric network partitions and jitter. |
eurorack-dsp |
Hardware & Firmware | C++20, ARM Cortex-M7 | Open-hardware Eurorack macro-oscillator module featuring bandlimited wavetable and FM synthesis with <1.2ms latency. |
๐ Technical Stack & Tooling
Core Systems Programming
- Languages: Rust (1.80+), Modern C++ (C++20/23), Go (1.23+), ANSI C (C99/C11), Zig
- OS Internals: Linux kernel (6.x), eBPF / BCC / libbpf,
io_uring, POSIX systems programming, memory mapping (mmap), hugepages
Storage & Concurrency
- Engines & Formats: RocksDB, SQLite internals, Parquet, WAL (Write-Ahead Logging), LSM-Trees, B-epsilon trees
- Concurrency Primitives: Lock-free data structures (crossbeam/epoch-based reclamation), atomics, RCU (Read-Copy-Update), actor models
Distributed Infrastructure
- Protocols & RPC: Raft consensus, Paxos, gRPC, FlatBuffers, Protocol Buffers, QUIC
- Observability & Perf: Linux
perf, eBPF traces, Flamegraphs, Valgrind (Callgrind/Helgrind), Cachegrind, Wireshark
Developer Environment
- Platform: Arch Linux (custom minimal kernel) / FreeBSD on workstation; Debian LTS on servers
- Editor & Tools: Neovim (Lua-configured), Tmux, Git, GNU Make / Ninja, CMake, Cargo
๐ Engineering Principles
- Mechanical Sympathy First
- Software must respect the underlying silicon: CPU cache-line alignment, branch prediction predictability, memory strides, and NVMe page boundaries matter more than premature syntactic elegance.
- Determinism over Cleverness
- Distributed algorithms and storage engines must be deterministic and verifiable through property testing and reproducible discrete-event simulation before hitting production.
- Crash-Only Software (Safe by Design)
- Systems should recover as safely and swiftly from an abrupt power loss (
SIGKILL/ kernel panic) as they do from a graceful shutdown. Recovery routines are the primary code path.
- Systems should recover as safely and swiftly from an abrupt power loss (
- Zero Unnecessary Allocations
- In critical data paths, allocations are bottlenecks. Arena allocators, static buffer rings, and amortized capacity keep latency tails (
p99.99) predictably flat.
- In critical data paths, allocations are bottlenecks. Arena allocators, static buffer rings, and amortized capacity keep latency tails (
๐ Recent Technical Notes & Articles
- Understanding Memory Stalls: Cache Hierarchies and Lock-Free Ring Buffers in High-Throughput Rust
- Lessons from Building an io_uring-Based LSM Engine from Scratch
- Simulating Asymmetric Byzantine and Network Partitions in Raft Clusters with TLA+
- Designing Real-Time Digital Audio Signal Pipelines on Bare-Metal ARM Cortex-M
๐ซ Get in Touch
- Email:
julian.vance.dev@proton.me - PGP Fingerprint:
7E9B 42F1 C8A3 91D0 562B E340 8821 54A0 C672 F18A - Matrix:
@julian:matrix.org - Code & Specs:
https://github.com/ejrniiii8-cloud
โSimplicity is prerequisite for reliability.โ โ Edsger W. Dijkstra