Best of metadata in 2025

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It is that time of year again to look back on a year of posts. I average about sixty posts annually. I don't explicitly plan for the number, and I sometimes skip weeks for travel or work, yet I somehow hit the number by December. Looking back, I always feel a bit proud. The posts make past Murat look sharp and sensible, and I will not argue with that. Here are some of the more interesting pieces from the roughly sixty posts of 2025.


Advice

Looks like I wrote several advice posts this year. I must be getting old.

The Invisible Curriculum of Research

Academic chat: On PhD

What I'd do as a College Freshman in 2025

My Time at MIT

What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?

Publish and Perish: Why Ponder Stibbons Left the Ivory Tower


Databases

Concurrency Control book reading was fun. Also the series on use of time in distributed databases. And it seems like I got hyperfocused on transaction isolation this year. 

Use of Time in Distributed Databases (part 5): Lessons learned (Link to the index)

Morty: Scaling Concurrency Control with Re-Execution

Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases

Analysing Snapshot Isolation


Distributed systems

We started a live paper reading series with Aleksey Charapko. It has been a lot of fun and provably a better way to read papers. My summaries/reviews of the papers we read together are more insightful than the papers I read solo. The first seven paper reviews below are from our live reading sessions. 

Asymmetric Linearizable Local Reads

Cabinet: Dynamically Weighted Consensus Made Fast

Can a Client–Server Cache Tango Accelerate Disaggregated Storage?

Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too!

Vive la Difference: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications

Mitigating Application Resource Overload with Targeted Task Cancellation

Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks

Analyzing Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems

Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases

Disaggregated Database Management Systems

Taurus Database: How to be Fast, Available, and Frugal in the Cloud

ATC/OSDI’25 Technical Sessions


AI

Of course AI!

Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research

Supporting our AI overlords: Redesigning data systems to be Agent-first

Neurosymbolic AI: Why, What, and How


Formal methods

And of course formal methods! Well mostly TLA+ in my case.

Modular verification of MongoDB Transactions using TLA+

Multi-Grained Specifications for Distributed System Model Checking and Verification

Notes from the TLA+ Community Event

Smart Casual Verification of the Confidential Consortium Framework

TLA+ Modeling of AWS outage DNS race condition



Best of previous years


Best of metadata in 2021

Best of metadata in 2020

Best of metadata in 2019

Best of metadata in 2018

Research, writing, and career advice

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