I’m Kareem Ashraf, a backend software engineer.

I started caring about databases for a concrete reason: I worked on a service that acted as a query builder, and the hard part was not writing SQL — it was making it fast. Indexing and vacuum helped, until they did not. I hit a ceiling where the usual knobs were not enough. To go further I had to understand the internals and the trade-offs behind them.

So I studied — books, articles, tutorials, and hands-on notes from running and breaking real systems. Database Engine-Level Thinking is that journey written down: what I have learned so far, what I am still learning, and how the internals connect to optimisation that shows up in production.

Not trivia for its own sake — mechanisms with a use case, for backend engineers who are tired of guessing.