Chapter-by-chapter review of ‘Building Evolutionary Architectures’ by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua: the problem each chapter solves, the key ideas and a diagram. Fitness functions, the architectural quantum, Expand/Contract, the Inverse Conway Maneuver, antipatterns and legacy migration strategies.
Tricolor marking is not a garbage collection algorithm so much as a coexistence protocol between the collector and a program that keeps rewriting the object graph mid-traversal. I walk through the invariant, the write barrier (including Go’s hybrid barrier from 1.8), allocate-black and mark assist — and hand you an interactive sandbox where you can switch the barrier off and watch the GC free a live object.
A deep dive into LLM agent memory architecture based on the MemRec paper (ACL 2026): collaborative memory, decoupling memory management from reasoning, Information Bottleneck. Comparison of the TOP-3 production tools — Mem0, Letta (MemGPT), and Zep — across nine axes. Highlighting the gap: research outpaces tooling.
Mutex and atomic are not two independent tools — they are one stack of abstractions. I dig through the stack from data race to starvation mode: why x++ is three ARM64 instructions, how CAS became a universal primitive (Herlihy 1991), why Mutex is built on top of atomic CAS, and how Russ Cox’s barging-vs-handoff debate (issue #13086) gave Go its 1ms starvation threshold. With public benchmarks, the bit layout of Mutex state, and a cheatsheet for when to reach for which.
Deep dive into agent memory mechanics: five memory files, four context assembly strategies, TOOLS.md as a dual-source responsibility, and Dreaming — background consolidation from Anthropic (Auto Dream, Dreams API, KAIROS) and OpenAI (Dreaming V3, 82.8% factual recall). Engineering decisions behind a production platform.