acknowledgments

First and foremost, thanks to my wife, Minna, and our children, Isak, Noah, and Elsa, for putting up with me disappearing into my office to write this book. Also, thanks to my mom, Erja, and dad, Rainer, for getting a computer at our home three decades ago, which put me on this path in the first place.

This book would honestly not exist without the fantastic Manning team: Suresh Jain for his persistence in convincing me to write a book proposal, Michael Stephens for shaping the idea into a comprehensive guide to low-latency patterns, and Katie Sposato Johnson for keeping me on track through the challenging process of writing while doing a million other things, like starting a company and pursuing a PhD.

Thanks to Behrad Babaee and Timmer Doumler, my technical editors, for making the book so much better by relentlessly making sure that what I was writing was not only technically accurate but also clearly written.

I’m also grateful to the people who shaped my understanding of latency optimization: Ashwin Rao, who taught me to model and measure latency as a distribution during my master’s thesis work; Christoph Lameter, who showed me how to write truly latency-sensitive code while maintaining Linux kernel memory allocators; and Avi Kivity, who expanded my understanding of building for low latency—from Little’s law to thread-per-core architectures—during my time working with him and the team on the OSv unikernel and Scylla database.