Lesson learned: never edit README on GitHub in the browser. Twice today, I was in the middle of editing, accidentally clicked a link that jumped to another page, hit back, and poof - everything was gone. Someone please give GitHub autosave (aka durable execution).

Go go go 💙

I recorded my #p99conf talk yesterday, and my speaker swag box just arrived too! Super sweet and thoughtful gift. I already deployed stickers on my laptop :) Huge thanks to the organizers @scylladb.com @cynthiadunlop.bsky.social for a smooth recording. Can't wait for the conference!

Debugging is fun, like solving a puzzle, especially with multiple dependencies involved. Today I first thought there was a bug in DBOS, then suspected Logfire, and finally pinpointed the issue to the OpenTelemetry Django instrumentor.

Let’s go 👍

I was drained today from a weird migraine - headache, fatigue, the whole thing. Then I joined a meeting and started talking about @dbos.dev and instantly felt better. I'm grateful and proud of what we're building. Happy weekend!

The South Bay Systems talk series is back on Oct 2nd. @codedrift.social will talk about the history and novel use cases of WebAssembly. Perfect timing too: Wasm 3.0 just released, and it is turning 10 this year. Huge thanks to @yugabytedb.bsky.social for hosting! Register here: luma.com/p3mibf27

Something you don't see every day: Postgres creator (and our CTO) Mike Stonebraker signed up for the DBOS user group next week. This time, Dosu will show how they use DBOS for document ingestion and agentic Q&A. Always inspiring to see what people are building! Come hang out with us (and Mike).

Looking forward to it!

At some point I might write a blog post on "How to add DBOS to any AI framework". AI agents are basically loops, and DBOS makes loops durable with a few decorators. Last week, I showed DBOS + Pydantic AI. Today, I implemented DBOS + CrewAI within a few hours. PR: github.com/crewAIInc/cr...

We had our first job posting from a customer on our Discord! And yes, I immediately told them to cross-post in @eatonphil.bsky.social Software Internals channel too. Awesome to see teams hiring specifically to expand their DBOS use cases. Join our community here: discord.gg/kgJeE7S2rA

It's an insightful conversation between Alex and Yunfan. Highly recommend checking it out if you're building or scaling production-grade multi-agent applications. Watch the full episode here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqSm...

Agreed. There are so many high-quality job postings for systems folks! Funny timing: earlier today, a customer asked if we had a jobs channel where they could share openings for roles that would be working with DBOS daily.

It's a good read. I notice that recently "durable execution" is becoming the new trendy word among AI agent frameworks.

Okay great. Now my teammates are calling me Chief Exterminator. I debug.

Durable Agents in Pydantic AI – now with DBOS support! @pydantic.dev 🤝 DBOS Run agents that: - Survive restarts, failures, and deploys - Handle long-running async + human-in-the-loop tasks - Autosave progress with SQLite/Postgres Production-grade resilience in just a few lines of code.

(Based on a true story today) Me: I should go to bed early. Also me: Nope I can't sleep. I really want to understand why this code isn't behaving as expected. ... N hour(s) later: I figured it out, filed the bug, and now I can finally sleep with peace of mind.

Check out our latest blog post! @jedberg.bsky.social shared his experience running queue services at Reddit, and reminded us why durable queues matter. "If the queue itself went down... we could just lose votes, or comments, or submissions." 🔗 www.dbos.dev/blog/durable...

Just merged the DBOS Agent PR into Pydantic AI! Huge thanks to the @pydantic.dev team for the detailed reviews and guidance throughout. Somewhere along the way, I came up with the word "DBOSify". More details coming soon!

The intro video for my talk at #p99conf 💙

Nothing makes me happier than seeing our customers win. If you spend time on GitHub, you've probably spotted the Dosu bot all over, including in some of the most popular AI frameworks. Now it's even more reliable: their ingestion and RAG pipelines run on @dbos.dev Blog: dosu.dev/blog/migrate...

I often call Steller's Jay the “mohawk bird”. It certainly has very cool hairstyle and grumpy harsh calls. #bird

It's a small experiment. My name is so common that finding me on LinkedIn used to mean scrolling through 100 pages of "Qian Li". So I updated my last name to "Li, PhD". It definitely makes me easier to find. Though I worry it sounds self-promotional. Hopefully it just helps people connect.

Took me almost an hour to record a 30-second intro for #p99conf Carefully tuned DSLR, mic, lighting, laptop, chair, background... had to align all the stars. I hope the final cut looks good!

Is there a website/tool that can turn an architecture diagram drawn with Google slides or powerpoint into ASCII art?

Now we have "Star Wars" across our four languages: DBOS TypeScript, Python, Go, and Java. Help us settle the galaxy balance by dropping your stars here: github.com/dbos-inc

DBOS now has its own subreddit! Come hang out, share ideas, ask questions, and help us shape the future of durable workflows and queues. Fun fact: our CEO @jedberg.bsky.social (aka jedberg) was the first employee at Reddit, and now he's our mod. Full circle moment. 🔗 www.reddit.com/r/dbos/

This looks fun!

The highlight of every user group is hearing directly from our users. Join us to see how doohickey.ai uses @dbos.dev to automate AI-powered ERP integrations. Thursday, August 28 @ 11AM PT Zoom (no recording — so don’t miss it!) lu.ma/8rqv5o5z

Packed calendar this week with many valuable discussions. Between meetings, I put together a Pydantic AI + DBOS integration to make it easier to build durable agents that checkpoint state and recover from failures. PR here: github.com/pydantic/pyd... Docs still to come. Feedback is very welcome!

☕️ Friends in the Bay Area: August coffee chat time! We're hosting the @southbaysystems.xyz August Coffee Chat next week. Come hang out with other systems folks for some casual conversations. 🗓 Thursday, August 28, 5–6 pm 📍 Courtyard outside Philz Sunnyvale 🔗 lu.ma/97e10ef4 Hope to see you there!

A new episode of SE Radio is live! I had a great time chatting with host Kanchan Shringi about what it takes to build durable, observable, and scalable systems, and why that matters for modern applications. Happy to hear thoughts and feedback! se-radio.net/2025/08/se-r...

Nowadays, I can often find the contribution guide (usually in CONTRIBUTING.md) of an open-source project in CLAUDE.md instead.

I'm truly grateful to be included in this year's Silicon Valley Business Journal 40 Under 40. It's an honor to be recognized alongside so many inspiring leaders and innovators. Big thanks to my amazing team for the support and for nominating me!

People often ask me about the differences in architecture between Amazon Dynamo (the 2007 SOSP paper), DynamoDB (the AWS serverless NoSQL database), and Aurora DSQL (the AWS serverless SQL databases). I memoized the response on my blog. brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08...

Seattle friends - in case you missed it: lu.ma/umtmqb38 The Seattle Systems group is hosting their very first meetup! @marcbrooker.bsky.social will be presenting Aurora DSQL. Excited to see more systems groups popping up (thanks @eatonphil.bsky.social). My colleague @devhawk.net is co-organizing.

I asked GPT-5 to "generate an image of you and me" in cartoon style. Here's what it came up with… well, it's been picturing me as a guy. It said: "I don’t actually know your gender unless you tell me — the image I generated just used a generic cartoon human because I didn’t have any reference."

FOMO is real, so I did drive up to SF for the SF Systems meetup last night. Totally worth it - fun talks and great conversations! Thanks @shadaj.me @chris.wensel.net and the team for organizing it.

The recommended time to leave our Sunnyvale office for a meetup in SF is insane 😂

LLM streaming is already common, but I like this newly released durable streams feature. In DBOS, streams are append-only, durable records tied to a workflow. If a process crashes, the full history is persisted in the database, making it easy to restore context and resume from where it left off.

I used to like using Em Dash and “ensure”, but I don’t use them anymore because I’m worried about being mistaken for AI generated. Also, emojis… 🥹

Looking forward to catching up with our friends at @bauplan.bsky.social

Great way to start the weekend. Find us sitting on the front page of Hacker News on a Friday afternoon.

Andy's talk was so fun that I didn't notice an hour flew by. Thanks Tejpal for a great shot of the back of my @dbos.dev T-shirt! Got asked a lot what DBOS stands for, so I just turned around and showed them: Durable Backends, Observable & Simple.

Recording for those who missed the talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdg3...

We had our biggest @southbaysystems.xyz meetup yet last night! Thanks to everyone who came, and thanks to Databricks for hosting! @andypavlo.bsky.social discussed the 50-year history of database tuning, applying AI/ML to the problem, and the future of auto-tuning (agentic reasoning, of course).

Community contributions are the best! I want to share this awesome DBOS Hono starter template created by our user: github.com/runablehq/db... It shows how to add durable workflows, retries, and background tasks to your stack just using Postgres + TypeScript. No app refactoring needed.

Java support is coming soon to DBOS! I almost forgot how much fun (and pain) comes with statically typed languages. Join our user group to try it out early. We’d love your feedback!

Okay now I know that Redis is an AI company (just like everyone else).

Happy weekend! I built my first voice agent this week and will present it at a meetup on Monday: lu.ma/o19i7hys I'm traveling to San Francisco multiple times a week, and I'll break my record by going every day in the next few days. The drive is long, but worth it if more people know @dbos.dev