About

About

About TheCoreDump

Raw tech insights, unfiltered.

TheCoreDump is an independent technical publication written and maintained by Mohit Mishra. It focuses on low-level systems programming, operating system internals, database engines, distributed systems resilience, and architectural forensics of real-world production outages.

The objective is simple: cut through marketing buzzwords and superficial overviews to examine how computing platforms actually operate under the hood—from CPU cache lines and virtual memory paging to global BGP route convergence and database storage engines.

About the Author

I am Mohit Mishra, a software engineer specializing in database performance, operating system internals, and distributed systems reliability. My engineering work and technical writing focus on understanding systems from the hardware boundary up to distributed application layers:

  • Database Engines & Storage Internals: PostgreSQL internals (MVCC, buffer pools, WAL, B-Tree indexing, write-back caching, lock contention), storage engine optimization, and transactional consistency models.
  • Operating Systems & Low-Level Architecture: Linux kernel mechanisms, virtual memory management, multi-level page tables, ELF binary parsing, process scheduling, dynamic linking, and concurrency primitives.
  • Distributed Systems & Cloud Outages: Conducting technical autopsies of real-world service disruptions (AWS, Cloudflare, Azure, Oracle Cloud), investigating cascading retries, BGP route withdrawals, DNS partition failures, and edge network routing.

Technical Focus Areas

The writing on TheCoreDump is organized around three recurring disciplines:

Production Incident Autopsies

Forensic breakdowns of major cloud and infrastructure incidents. Each analysis examines root causes, architectural contributing factors, failure cascades, and systemic lessons learned from real incidents at scale—including DNS resolution failures, BGP route withdrawals, and automated script bugs.

Database Systems & Storage Engines

Deep dives into the internal mechanics of database engines, with a strong focus on PostgreSQL. Topics include multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), transaction isolation levels (RCSI vs. Read Committed), asynchronous I/O pipelines, SSD page alignment, and lock hierarchies.

Systems & Kernel Engineering

Explorations of low-level software design and systems programming in C/C++. Areas covered include custom memory allocators, asynchronous event multiplexing (epoll/select), Unix domain and network sockets, dynamic linker mechanics, and processor memory architectures.

Publication Telemetry

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1184
Cumulative readership across technical guides, OS series, and architecture deep dives
GitHub Community
824
Developers following open-source implementations and engineering notes
Publication Channels
  • TheCoreDump Core 791
  • Exploring OS 153
  • Learning Resources 105
  • Architecture & Legacy 73
  • Reversing Bits 25
  • Executables & Tooling 23
  • OS Journey 14
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Publications & Writing Elsewhere

In addition to TheCoreDump, select articles and newsletters are published across external platforms:

Connect & Contact

For consulting inquiries, technical discussions, system architecture reviews, or errata, feel free to reach out via email.

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."

— Mark Weiser