Farshid/Ashouri

Notes on software engineering

Things I learn
building systems

Distributed systems, workflow orchestration, PostgreSQL and the things I learn building durable software.

541 Posts
511 Topics
4 Years
  1. 2026

  2. I Built My Own CI/CD, and the Interesting Part Wasn't the CI

    On replacing GitHub Actions with something that owns almost nothing — and why that turned out to be the whole point.

    ci/cd continuous-integration continuous-deployment github-actions sre
    21 min read

  3. RevolutX, Good, Bad, Ugly

    A technical and product review of Revolut's crypto exchange, from building an automated market maker on it — the documented behaviour, the undocumented behaviour, the arithmetic that decides…

    revX RevolutX exchange crypto venue
    16 min read

  4. Nature’s Pinocchios

    disclaimer : AI helped me to generate most parts of the text and make it more readable. The Deceptive Nature of the Animal Kingdom: Instinct or Intent?

    science
    4 min read
  5. 2025

  6. The Shape-Shifter: Why AI-Driven Polymorphic Attacks Keep Me Up at Night

    We used to have it relatively easy. When I first started paying attention to cybersecurity, malware was static. It was a specific file, with a specific "fingerprint" (hash).

    cybersecurity malware polymorphic attack
    2 min read

  7. Highway Workflow Engine

    The Bank-Grade, Postgres-Native Workflow Engine. Highway is a durable workflow orchestration engine designed for systems where data integrity is non-negotiable .

    highway temporal dbos enterprise
    3 min read

  8. Zero Dependency Context Aware Command Line Project Management

    Code Agent Optimised Issue Tracker / Zero Dependency Context Aware Command Line Project Management 🤖 + = 🚀 I built a command-line issue tracking system for software development projects.

    llm project-management issue-tracker
    1 min read

  9. issue.db / your issue tracker in your repo

    So this was this week's side project: issue-queue.readthedocs.io here is the workflow: I hope you find it useful.

    issue-tracker project-management cli
    1 min read

  10. Authorisation for Humans - A complete RBAC library

    Auth is a RBAC lib I started back in 2015, when I badly needed something simple and quick. Since then, developers have download it hundreds of thousands of times, indeed, Pyhton Software Organisation…

    auth rbac python-library enterprise authorisation
    1 min read

  11. Castle vs. Moat

    This is the classic "Castle vs. Moat" debate in security architecture. While Docker provides a Moat (isolation from the host machine), the Sandbox provides the Code of Conduct (rules for what happens…

    docker til
    1 min read

  12. Circuit breakers needs durable state

    I just noticed that I have missed a big point during the design phase of my workflow engine! I Leonard that, proper circuit breakers must have a durable state in a proper database.

    circut-breaker distributed-systems til
    1 min read

  13. Critical lessons from implementing a highly complex workflow system

    - Transaction Boundaries are Sacred: When spawning child tasks, the parent MUST commit its transaction before children become visible to workers.

    til distributed-systems psycopg3 postgresql postgres
    1 min read

  14. Building Datashard: Solving Data Corruption in High-Concurrency ML Workflows

    I've been working on Highway, a Strict Atomic Workflow Management System that handles massive amounts of log data from multiple concurrent processes.

    Apache-Iceberg Apache Iceberg DataShard Snapshots
    2 min read

  15. A new Article about what I am doing

    I just published this article medium.com/@erlang/bank-grade-workflow-engine

    articles
    1 min read

  16. A comparison of advanced workflow engines

    Feature Highway Workflow Engine DBOS (from Demos) Apache Airflow Tork — — — — — Core Philosophy Decoupled Library . A resilient engine you integrate into your app. Integrated Framework .

    dbos highway workflow-engine durable-executions
    2 min read

  17. A complete workflow domain-specific language - Highway DSL

    rodmena-limited.github.io/highway dsl/ link to specs are here

    highway-dsl pypi workflow-engine dsl spec
    1 min read

  18. How to run processes in with limited resources in Linux (no Docker needed)

    It's super powerful and simple:

    cgroups isolation namespaces
    1 min read

  19. Running fully isolated commands in Linux

    To use to run a Python command that cannot see or touch files outside its own folder, you must combine with .

    isolation linux chroot unshare
    1 min read

  20. Thundering herd problem

    The thundering herd problem occurs in computing when a large number of processes, threads, or client requests, all waiting for a specific event or resource, are awakened or triggered simultaneously…

    thundering-herd processes threads cache-stampede iitter
    2 min read

  21. TOCTOU (Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use) vulnerability

    I encountered a bug during development of my distributed workflow engine, and I learned that: A TOCTOU (Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use) vulnerability is a software security issue that occurs when an…

    toc toctou Time-of-Check Time-of-Use vulnerability
    2 min read

  22. Durable Workflow Engines - Ridiculously Jumper!

    Update: I have abandoned using Jumper. It's buggy and the maintainers are not very welcoming to contributions. I am building my own.

    highway-dsl domain-specific-language dsl jumper postgres
    5 min read