Home on Alex Rasmussen

The Tip of the Iceberg

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A deep dive into the Iceberg open table format, examining the rationale for its creation, internal mechanics, and advanced capabilities. Drawing from years of production experience, this talk offers both theoretical foundations and practical insights for engineers considering adopting Iceberg.

The Real World Math and Implications of S3's 99.999999999% Advertised Durability

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon S3 advertises 11 9’s of durability for both Standard and One Zone-IA object storage classes. This is a mind-bogglingly high level of durability. The way AWS puts it, if you’ve stored 10 million objects, you can expect to lose about one object about every 10,000 years - even within a single availability zone!

EarthBound's almost-Turing-complete text system!

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

EarthBound, a role-playing game released for the Super Nintendo in 1994, is one of the most universally revered games of all time. At the core of EarthBound is a super-complex scripting language that controls text, scripted cutscenes, music, sound effects, window management, and more. In this talk, we’ll explore some of the language’s more interesting or charming features.

Schema Evolution Patterns

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody’s talking about microservices, but nobody seems to agree on how to make them talk to each other. How should you version your APIs, and how does API version deprecation actually work in practice? Do you use plain old JavaScript object notation (JSON), Thrift, protocol buffers, GraphQL? How do teams communicate changes in their services’ interfaces, and how do consumer services respond? Separately, nobody seems to agree on how to handle migrating a service’s structured data without downtime. Do you write to shadow tables? Chain new tables off the old ones? Just run the migration live and hope nothing bad happens? Switch everything over to NoSQL?

How Do We Solve the World's Spreadsheet Problem?

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the past five years, I have spent a lot of time trying to get high-integrity data out of spreadsheets and into databases. In this talk, I explore common data integrity problems when dealing with spreadsheet data, investigate whether those integrity problems are inescapable, and share ongoing work to mitigate them.

Unorthodox Paths to High Performance

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This talk examines some lessons learned while building record-setting sorting systems at UC San Diego, and how understanding your hardware, architecting for experimentation, and re-examining your assumptions can make building high-performance systems easier.

Video and slides are available on InfoQ.

Flat Datacenter Storage

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In January 2015, I gave a talk at Papers We Love, a meetup in San Francisco for engineers who like talking about computer science research. The talk focuses on Flat Datacenter Storage and the example it can set for system designers.

Slides on SlideShare.

My talk was preceded by a lightning talk by Sargun Dhillon on VL2. It’s useful background; if you’d like to watch that talk, rewind the video to the beginning.

About

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

I’m a software engineer and maker based in Los Angeles. I’m currently a freelance data engineer.

I earned my Ph.D. in 2013 from University of California, San Diego, working in the Systems and Networking Group under the supervision of Dr. Amin Vahdat. The title of my thesis was “I/O-Efficient Data-Intensive Computing”.

Prior to getting my Ph.D., I earned my M.S. in Computer Science from UCSD in 2010, and my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2007.