LAB_STATUS: ONLINE/ACTIVE_EXPERIMENTS: 07/LAST_COMMIT: 2026-05-29 09:14 UTC/UPTIME: 99.98%/REGION: EDGE_GLOBAL
MERCTECHSResearch
Applied Technology R&D

We research the hard parts of building software.

Merctechs Research is the engineering collective's open lab — where we profile runtimes, stress-test architectures, and publish what we learn. No marketing. Just measurements, trade-offs, and code.

38+
Papers & field notes
07
Experiments running
12
Open-source releases
160ms
Median deploy time
Focus / 06_DOMAINS

Where we point the instruments.

Six domains where small engineering decisions compound into orders-of-magnitude differences in cost, latency, and reliability.

01

Distributed Systems

Consensus, replication, and the real-world cost of consistency under partition and load.

CRDTsRaftPartitioning
02

Machine Learning

Inference economics — quantization, distillation, and serving large models on constrained hardware.

InferenceQuantizationRAG
03

Runtime Performance

Cold starts, allocator behavior, and squeezing predictable latency out of edge runtimes.

EdgeWASMProfiling
04

Data Infrastructure

Streaming pipelines, backpressure, and schema evolution without downtime at scale.

StreamingPostgresMigrations
05

Security & Crypto

Sandboxing untrusted code, key management, and the practicality of post-quantum primitives.

SandboxingPQCZero-trust
06

Developer Tooling

Build systems, observability, and the ergonomics that decide whether a team ships fast.

BuildTracingDX

Field Notes / LATEST

Recently published.

All field notes

Lab / LIVE_EXPERIMENTS

Running on the bench right now.

Open experiments with live telemetry. We publish methodology and raw numbers as each one resolves.

EXP_07 · SPECDECLive

Speculative Decoding Latency Gains

Measuring real-world token throughput from draft-model speculation across batch sizes 1–64 on commodity GPUs.

72%
EXP_06 · WASM_SBXLive

WASM as a Plugin Sandbox

Benchmarking host-call overhead and memory isolation for running untrusted third-party plugins in production.

55%
EXP_05 · ZD_MIGRATEBeta

Zero-Downtime Schema Migrations

A dual-write + backfill harness for evolving Postgres schemas under live traffic with verifiable rollback.

88%
EXP_08 · PQC_TLSQueued

Post-Quantum TLS Handshake Cost

Quantifying the handshake-size and CPU penalty of hybrid Kyber key exchange on edge nodes.

12%

People / THE_COLLECTIVE

The engineering collective.

A small group of engineers who'd rather measure than guess. Everyone here writes code and publishes findings.

LH

Long Hoang

Principal · Systems

Distributed systems, backend architecture, runtime profiling.

NT

Nguyen Tran

Research Eng · ML

Inference optimization, quantization, on-device models.

MP

Minh Pham

Research Eng · Security

Sandboxing, cryptography, zero-trust architectures.

DV

Duc Vo

Research Eng · Data

Streaming pipelines, storage engines, observability.

Subscribe / RESEARCH_LOG

Read every experiment as it resolves.

New field notes drop as the numbers come in — no schedule, no fluff. Bookmark the log.