Dominik Tornow
dominiktornow.bsky.social
Dominik Tornow
@dominiktornow.bsky.social
Founder Resonate HQ | Distributed Async Await | Thinking in Distributed Systems | https://dtornow.substack.com
Pinned
From the terminal to the cloud, from prototype to production

Learn how agents scale beyond a single machine and master identity, coordination, and recovery

Build a recursive, distributed Deep Research Agent with @resonatehqio.bsky.social + OpenAI—in under 120 lines

Chapter 3 is live
Reposted by Dominik Tornow
The Write Last, Read First Rule

How to guarantee strict serializability across database systems

A special guest post from @dominiktornow.bsky.social

tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-11...
November 6, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Partial Failure & Partial Retry

RPCs create recovery boundaries: When an execution crashes, only the executions within its recovery boundaries restart

Executions in different recovery boundaries (across RPCs) continue running.
November 5, 2025 at 6:10 PM
Partial Failure but Total Retry?!

If we follow the familiar model of chained HTTP calls then a failure in the chain forces a restart from the failure point

This works for short-lived, cheap executions, but collapses under long-lived, expensive ones
November 5, 2025 at 2:30 PM
From the terminal to the cloud, from prototype to production

Learn how agents scale beyond a single machine and master identity, coordination, and recovery

Build a recursive, distributed Deep Research Agent with @resonatehqio.bsky.social + OpenAI—in under 120 lines

Chapter 3 is live
November 3, 2025 at 9:10 AM
A Promise doesn’t just represent eventual completion

A Promise also represents eventual invocation

We just tend to forget the latter
November 2, 2025 at 3:28 PM
I'm experimenting with animations for the 3rd chapter of Systems Engineering for Agentic Applications

This shows the call graph of the recursive, distributed Research Agent unfolding over time, highlighting durable promises

I dig the result but they are a lot of work 🥲
November 1, 2025 at 7:20 PM
Weekend Treat ... sorry ... Read 🎃

Formal models are magic. Not only as a verification tool but as a thinking tool, lifting the fog of uncertainty and assumption

Their magic lies in rigorous, ruthless, relentless clarity
November 1, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Two sentences explain I/O better than any CS course

If an expression yields an effect, it percolates through the program to the top, with the context stored as a continuation. An external authority handles the effect and passes the result back to the continuation.
October 30, 2025 at 9:55 AM
Uncertainty, formalized: Possible Worlds

The fewer worlds an agent considers possible, the less his uncertainty, and the more he knows

In Reasoning about Knowledge
October 24, 2025 at 10:18 AM
Trampolined Style

If you want to understand Event Loops, you need to read this paper from 1999:

A trampolined program is organized as a single loop in which computations are scheduled and allowed to proceed in discrete steps.

Grokking Event Loops = Grokking Continuations
October 23, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Join me in 30 min. I'll be in the live chat
P99 CONF is next week! Which talks are on your "can't miss" list?
October 22, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Building a recursive, distributed Deep Research Agent, scaling to hundreds of agents across dozens of nodes

Chapter 3 covers:

➡️ Agent Identity
➡️ Coordination
➡️ Recovery

When agents leave the terminal, you need to become a distributed systems engineer
October 22, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Roll up your newspapers, we’re squashing Heisenbugs with Deterministic Simulation Testing 🗞️

Join my talk tomorrow 11/22, 11:20 AM PDT

I'll be in the live chat for Q&A

Sign up below ⬇️
P99 CONF is next week! Which talks are on your "can't miss" list?
October 21, 2025 at 7:25 PM
T-2d
Did the dreaded Heisenbug infect your system?! Then don't miss my talk on Deterministic Simulation Testing

See you next week
P99 CONF is next week! Which talks are on your "can't miss" list?
October 20, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Run your app for minutes, hours, days, weeks, or month

On FaaS like AWS Lambda or GCP Functions

Serverless @resonatehqio.bsky.social
October 20, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Introducing Serverless @resonatehqio.bsky.social

Build distributed, durable applications with Resonate's dead simple programming model, Distributed Asynchronous Await

Now on serverless
October 20, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Did the dreaded Heisenbug infect your system?! Then don't miss my talk on Deterministic Simulation Testing

See you next week
P99 CONF is next week! Which talks are on your "can't miss" list?
October 14, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by Dominik Tornow
The 1st Table Mountain Database Management Seminar
Oct 9, 2025

An overnight hike — DBMS philosopher walk and talks, card games, South African braai under starry skies — with TigerBeetle, professors Philippe Bonnet and @peterabcz.bsky.social, and @dominiktornow.bsky.social

#TMDBMS
October 11, 2025 at 2:08 PM
From brainstorming transactional applications with the @tigerbeetle.com team to drafting blog posts with Table Mountain as backdrop

Cape Town is a whole vibe
October 8, 2025 at 8:05 AM
In the next chapter of Systems Engineering for Agentic Applications:

When agents leave the terminal, agentic applications become distributed applications.

We'll cover

➡️ Coordination
➡️ Recovery
➡️ Progress

And why you should never hang your agent off a TCP connection 🔪
October 7, 2025 at 9:45 AM
Distributed Async Await

✅ Simulation tested
❌ Formally verified

Interested in some live coding ... wait, no ... specifying a distributed protocol?!

Who’s up for a webinar to formalize @resonatehqio.bsky.social protocol stack. From scratch. In quint.

Let me see hands
October 2, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Chapter 2 gets a more formal treatment of Agents, environments, autonomy, alignment, etc

Helpful or heavy?!
The second chapter of Systems Engineering for Agentic Applications just dropped

This chapter covers

➡️ Agents & Environments
➡️ Goals & Plans
➡️ Context Engineering

+ We build an agent to organize our desktop

Bonus: Is MCP just calling functions by name?!

bsky.app/profile/domi...
October 1, 2025 at 8:45 PM
MCP: real innovation or literally just a function call?!

Where do you stand in the protocol debate?
The second chapter of Systems Engineering for Agentic Applications just dropped

This chapter covers

➡️ Agents & Environments
➡️ Goals & Plans
➡️ Context Engineering

+ We build an agent to organize our desktop

Bonus: Is MCP just calling functions by name?!

bsky.app/profile/domi...
October 1, 2025 at 2:05 PM
The second chapter of Systems Engineering for Agentic Applications just dropped

This chapter covers

➡️ Agents & Environments
➡️ Goals & Plans
➡️ Context Engineering

+ We build an agent to organize our desktop

Bonus: Is MCP just calling functions by name?!

bsky.app/profile/domi...
October 1, 2025 at 8:10 AM
The second chapter of Systems Engineering for Agentic Applications will drop tomorrow

We'll cover

➡️ Agents and Environments
➡️ Goals and Plans
➡️ Autonomy and Alignment
➡️ Context Engineering

+ We build an agent to organize our desktop

agenticapplications.substack.com
September 30, 2025 at 10:31 AM