About

I'm Sherman Hayes. I work on storage and database infrastructure — the unglamorous layer that other teams are entitled to take for granted, and only think about on the days it fails them.

I've been doing this for about fourteen years, most recently at a mid-sized company you haven't heard of, on the team that runs the databases everyone else builds on. Before that, a stretch at a company that was very sure it needed to build its own storage layer and turned out to be wrong about that, which I learned more from than any of the projects that worked.

This site is where I write down things I had to figure out twice. Most of the posts started as an internal document, a postmortem, or a long message to a colleague that I decided other people might as well be able to read. If a post seems oddly specific, it's because it is: it happened.

I live in Minneapolis with my wife and a dog who is deeply suspicious of the furnace. I ride a bicycle through the winter, which people here find normal and everyone else finds alarming.

Corrections are genuinely welcome, especially the embarrassing kind: sherman@shermanhayes.com. Everything here is mine and not my employer's.