Jordi Villar

https://jordivillar.com

I build distributed data systems that operate at scale. What draws me to this work is understanding how things actually work, whether that's performance challenges at scale or diving deep into system internals.

Jordi Villar

Entries

  • How Lazy Container Loading Works

    A few weeks ago I read Modal’s post on truly serverless GPUs. They describe getting GPU container starts from many mi...

  • 2026W20

    We’ve made the world too complicated — The piece names something I keep circling back to — most of us operate daily w...

  • The Algorithm Behind Shazam

    I never really thought about how Shazam works. You hold your phone up, it tells you the song, you move on. Then I rea...

  • Act like what you want to be

    I used to roll my eyes at people who started a new sport and immediately bought all the gear. Day one of running and ...

  • 2026W13

    The Singularity Will Not Be Streamed — What makes this story land is the contrast. The Singularity doesn’t get stoppe...

  • Nobody Talks About the Hardware

    These days I’ve found myself reading about hardware shortage and how RAM, disk, and NAND manufacturers have all their...

  • Between jobs

    Currently I’m between jobs. Nothing special, a lot of people go between jobs. After working for several years on a fa...

  • 2026W10

    Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity — The Engineer A vs Engineer B comparison is painfully recognizable. A ships a 50...

  • 2026W07

    Hedonism and Entrepreneurship in Barcelona — A potential acquisition dies because a vegan exec unknowingly eats mayo ...

  • Four Years at Tinybird

    I worked at Tinybird for 4 years, 2 months, and 21 days. It’s been an incredible experience that taught me a lot abou...

  • 2026W05

    My AI Adoption Journey — The most practical thing here is the “reproduce your own work” phase: doing tasks manually a...

  • 2026W04

    Automatic Programming — The distinction antirez makes here finally gave me language for something I’ve been fumbling ...

  • 2026W03

    I’m addicted to being useful — This hit close. The idea that some of us are fundamentally wired to solve problems, an...

  • Trust AI, But Verify

    I wanted to understand buffer pool replacement policies better. So I asked Claude to run an experiment: implement LRU...

  • Work only I can do

    My entire strategy is to do the work only I can do. Work that can’t be taught. Work that requires some unique combina...

  • 2026W00

    Distinguishing yourself early in your career as a developer — Honestly? This hit different. Phil breaks down the job ...

  • 2025W51

    How uv got so fast — This one hit different because everyone’s been saying “uv is fast because Rust” but the real sto...

  • 166 hours

    Last year I wrote about hitting 130 hours of working out. I ended that note with a line I repeated three times: “I’m ...

  • 2025W50

    Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life — This hit different. The distinction between thin desires (scrolling, checking not...

  • 2025W49

    SQLite JSON Superpower: Virtual Columns + Indexing — This is one of those “why didn’t I know about this sooner?” mome...