Ddia on Akshay Deshpande

Encoding: From the POV of Dataflow paths

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When studying Chapter 4 of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Encoding and Evolution), I quickly encounters a level of granularity that seems mechanical: binary formats, schema evolution, and serialization techniques. Yet behind this technical scaffolding lies something conceptually deeper. Encoding is not merely a process of serialization; it is the very grammar through which distributed systems express and interpret meaning. It is the act that allows a system’s internal thoughts — the data in memory — to be externalized into a communicable form. Without it, a database, an API, or a Kafka stream would be nothing but incomprehensible noise.

[DDIA Book] : Data Models and Query Languages

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[Self Notes and Review]:

This is a second writeup in the series of reading DDIA book and publishing my notes from the book.
The first one can be found here

This particular article is from the second chapter of the book. Again, these are just my self notes/extracts and treat this more like an overview/summary. Best way is to read the book in itself.

This chapter dwells in to the details of: the format in which we write data to databases and mechanism by which we read it back.

[DDIA Book]: Reliable, Scalable and Maintainable Application

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[Self Notes and Review]:

This is a new series of publications where I am publishing my self notes/extracts from reading the very famous book - DDIA (Designing Data-Intensive Applications) by Martin Kleppmann.

This particular article is from the first chapter of the book. Again, these are just my self notes/extracts and treat this more like an overview/summary. Best way is to read the book in itself.

Side note: I am a terribly slow and repetitive reader. The update between chapters might take weeks.