$ whoami
Kai Nakamura — systems engineer, mostly Rust and Go.
I work on storage engines and the unglamorous parts of distributed systems. Currently at Runway Labs, previously six years on database internals.
// open source
Things I maintain, with the honest status of each.
shardwright
Rust · 4.2k ★ · actively maintainedRange-partitioned key-value store with online resharding. Powers three production clusters I know of.
lattice-rpc
Go · 1.8k ★ · maintenance onlyTyped RPC over QUIC. Stable and finished; I fix bugs but I'm not adding features.
pagecache-viz
C · 610 ★ · experimentalVisualises Linux page cache behaviour under load. Built it to win an argument, kept it because it was useful.
Process
How the work actually runs
- 1
Read the code
Every project is public. Judge the commits before you judge the README.
- 2
Reproduce it
Benchmarks ship with their harness. Run them on your own hardware.
- 3
Open an issue
I answer within a working day, including the ones that turn out to be my bug.
- 4
Depend on it
Nothing here is pre-1.0 unless the README says so in the first line.
6.6k
GitHub stars
312
PRs reviewed in 2025
11yr
Writing systems code
3
Talks given this year
“Kai's review comments are the reason our storage layer survived the migration. He found the bug in the WAL replay before it ever ran in prod.”
Daniel Okafor
Staff Engineer, Runway Labs
Selected clients
Who the work was for
Before you get in touch
Are you available for hire?
For consulting on storage and consistency problems, yes. Not for a full-time role, and not for frontend work.
Will you review my architecture?
Usually, if it is interesting. Send the design doc rather than the repository; the doc is where the problems are.
Why is lattice-rpc in maintenance only?
Because it is finished. It does what it set out to do, and adding features to a stable wire protocol is how you break other people.
Do you take PRs?
Yes, and I review them within a working day. Open an issue first for anything larger than a bug fix.
$ mail kai@nakamura.dev
Open to consulting on storage and consistency problems. Not looking for a full-time role.