Built on Shards of Silicon is a personal technical blog by Robert Alexander that focuses on careful, evidence-based examinations of software engineering assumptions. Rather than publishing broad tutorials, it digs into specific standards and implementation details that developers often take for granted.
The featured article analyzes UUIDv7 and challenges the widely repeated claims that these identifiers are monotonically increasing, carry a reliable creation timestamp, and remain unguessable. It argues that only uniqueness and collision resistance are strictly guaranteed, and it examines RFC-compliant implementations that violate the other properties.
The site is aimed at backend developers, database engineers, and anyone who works with identifier schemes, indexing, or data modeling. Readers who want to understand the gap between specification language and real-world behavior will get the most value from it.
Use this blog as a reference when evaluating identifier strategies or when you need a critical second opinion on a commonly cited technical claim. It rewards close reading rather than skimming, and it is best consumed alongside the relevant RFCs and database documentation.
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