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Murali Krishnan A
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Things I have had to learn twice, written down so I only have to learn them once more.

7 posts

Earlier

2025

  1. Googling was the skill. Now it's prompting.

    For years the best programmers were the best searchers. That skill has moved, and most of what made someone good at it still applies.

    19 Aug 2025 · 5 min

  2. Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Typesense: what I learned running search at scale

    How an inverted index actually works, why relevance is a tuning problem and not a feature, and an honest comparison of the three engines most teams end up choosing between.

    04 Mar 2025 · 8 min

2024

  1. CRDTs, ProseMirror, and why Google Docs doesn't use either

    The math behind conflict-free collaborative editing, how it fits into ProseMirror and Tiptap, and the reason the most famous collaborative editor in the world took a completely different route.

    12 Nov 2024 · 8 min

2022

  1. npm, yarn, pnpm: I moved for speed, stayed for the hard link

    I switched package managers twice, the second time because node_modules was eating my laptop. The thing that actually saves the disk is not the part I gave credit to. This is what a full node_modules folder taught me about symlinks, hard links, and the folder I had never looked inside.

    13 Feb 2022 · 5 min

2020

  1. Building a consent system for airports on Hyperledger Fabric

    My first blockchain project. Why a permissioned chain instead of Ethereum, what chaincode actually is, why the personal data never touched the ledger, and the design decisions I would defend today.

    22 Sept 2020 · 15 min

  2. I rewrote SSL in my first year of college. Here is what it taught me.

    Hedge won a Facebook productization grant in 2017. It captured browsing activity in internet cafes, scored it with NLP, and moved it over a handshake I built myself. Most of what I learned came from the parts I got wrong.

    14 Jun 2020 · 9 min