Samyak Sarnayak

Why the volcano model doesn't work

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The volcano model of implementing databases has been popular for a long time. These are my notes on where it stops working and why we need a better abstraction.

Cancellation in async rust

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My talk at Rust India Conference 2026 on cancellation in async rust

An interactive exploration of McLeod's Pitch Detection Method

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Pluto.jl notebook implementing the 2005 paper titled “A Smarter Way To Find Pitch” by Philip McLeod et al.

Variance in type systems

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A brief explanation of what covariant, contravariant and invariant mean. With examples in various languages.

How is sound represented in code?

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An overview of how audio is represented as data.

tremolisto: a collection of isolated guitar parts

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A list of songs with just their guitar solos and riffs. These parts are available to play directly on the website (for now).

Turns out that BFS is not the same as topological sort

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Graph algorithms explained through interactive visualizations

Thoughts on migrating DNS from Netlify to Cloudflare

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 19:07:07 +0530

DNS migration and open sourcing a tool used for it

Mob Programming and Rust

Sun, 29 May 2022 16:30:31 +0530

Have you ever wanted to just think about what needs to be done and the code for it automagically gets written? Well, I have. In its ideal form, this is what pair/mob programming would do — the navigator(s) simply think about and express their idea of what needs to happen and the driver magically gets it done. In the real world though, this does not happen.

Hello there!

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 23:36:15 +0530

Welcome to my blog

About

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 18:33:57 +0530

Hi! I’m Samyak Sarnayak, a software tinkerer. Outside of programming, I’m still trying to figure out life.

My current, and newfound, interest is in the field of programming languages and compiler design. However, I’m always open to learning something new in the broader field of systems programming; especially if it relates to performance optimizations, parallelism, containers or distributed systems.

Most of my projects are open sourced on my GitHub.

On water and systems

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

or how docker is a plumbing system

Solving A Git Murder Mystery

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

gitstery is a murder mystery game entirely contained in a git repo!

My old games

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I was in school, about 6-7 years ago, I had found a new hobby and passion - making games. I’m not sure how but I found a free 3D game maker named 3D Rad. I played around a lot with it on my ancient PC, which had a Pentium 4 and 1 Gigabyte of RAM.

Multiplanetary civilisation?

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Elon Musk recently tweeted about the logistics requirements for a Multiplanetary civilisation. He says that at a minimum, megatons of equipment and other resources have to be put in orbit every year. For reference, a Saturn V (the launch vehicle used to send humans to the moon), can take a payload of around 140 tons to Low Earth Orbit. A launch of Saturn V costs $1.23 billion (in 2019 value). To reach the goal of a megaton per year there would have to be more than 7000 launches per year, or 20 launches per day! That would cost $8.8 trillion(!). But of course, technology has come a long way since 1969.

Portfolio

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Publications #

Analysis of Garbage Collection Patterns to Extend Microbenchmarks for Big Data Workloads (2022) #

Peer reviewed Conference

Built an open source tool to analyze garbage collection in the JVM at an object-level granularity.