Interviewed an LLM recently for a system design interview. Candidate responded every question with a 5 second lag. There was a bit of eye shifting, but *very* subtle. The answers were unnaturally fluent and canonical.

The peril of laziness lost bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/t...

I think I have completed my five stage of grief (AI edition): denial:"AI is overhyped" anger: "AI code is a sloppy mess!" bargaining: "maybe AI will stay at jr. eng level..." depression: "does craftsmanship still matter?" acceptance: "well, at least I don't have to write boilerplate code anymore..."

This has been my observation, but curious if anyone else feel this way: - if you are a builder at heart, using AI to code energizes you - if you are a craftsman at heart, using AI to code feels like it’s taking something away from you

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Nobody: Me: honey I think I finally have an explanation for why you have better senses (taste/smell/vision) than me: my ancestors invented agriculture earlier than yours, and evolution pruned my expensive sensory hardware to adapt to the modern world, while you are still fit for hunter-gatherer

One thing I'm excited about with The Consensus is giving you a hub to find interesting 1) jobs and 2) events going on in systems programming.

I will be speaking at the Monster Scale Summit this year to talk about ClickPipes. Hope to see you there! 😊

If you're curious what it takes to run #AdventOfCode every year, I have a talk called Advent of Code: Behind the Scenes that you might enjoy: youtu.be/uZ8DcbhojOw

"eBPF is becoming the strategic platform of choice for infrastructure teams" This line from latest eBPF Foundation report written by Andrew Green is going to be doing a lot of work in the next decade. ebpf.foundation/new-state-of...

Happy advent of code month!

Nobody: Me: (in k8s land) if a replicaSet contains only one pod, is it still a *replica* set?

This is so cliche but it is also so true — every time I grow in life/career is when I find myself in a situation I’m not ready/comfortable with. I love routine, but have to keep reminding myself to break it from time to time.

Just like how human are bad at writing correct concurrent code, we are also bad at solving concurrent problems in our lives (both leads to *panic*, lol) So the advice of only introduce concurrency if you must applies as life advice too: solve one problem at a time, multitask only if you must.

This is great and to-the-point.

Best of OSS -- when your customer find new ways optimize your Postgres ingestion pipeline. github.com/PeerDB-io/pe...

Hello, friends! After 10(!) years of #AdventOfCode, I've made some changes to preserve my sanity: there will be 12 days of puzzles each December (still starting Dec 1) and there is no longer a global leaderboard. Read more: adventofcode.com/2025/about#f... adventofcode.com/2025/about#f...

Quite optimistic about this project and the great people behind it.

LLM output much?

Really great opportunity for those who want to learn more about sync engines / building real time applications.

Now that we have all retreated from Monday’s world wide war rooms… anybody beat this chaos monkey on hard mode?

People are like programming languages, with personalities on a spectrum between strongly typed and weakly typed. The strongly typed prefer routines, structures, and consistency; the weakly typed prefer and thrive in a dynamically changing environment. Yes I am strongly typed 😆

We are hiring an EM for the database integration team (ClickPipes) at ClickHouse! job-boards.greenhouse.io/clickhouse/j...

Great blogpost summarizing a paper that I now must read.

One of my favourite things about working at ClickHouse (and storage systems in general) is we get to nerd out on performance optimizations constantly.

Woke up this morning to find my gophers playing Go. Huh.

When working on an international team, one thing I learned is that interpersonal communication and team culture is navigated very differently from when the entire team comes from a similar cultural background.

[new blog post] Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/disa...

Netflix had it all wrong, don’t waste engineering resources to build your own chaos monkey infrastructure, just put production on AWS us-east-1 and you get chaos monkey for free. Just kidding, just kidding…

Underrated comment 😂

Short visit to Bay Area. Caltrains got a lot nicer but a lot less commuters comparing to pre-pandemic.

It's so gratifying to introduce new users to ClickHouse's powerful JSON data type; and seeing their reaction when they test out its performance for the first time. If you like a good technical reading, don't miss out on this blogpost: clickhouse.com/blog/a-new-p...

JSON data type is one of my favorite features at ClickHouse for its elegant design and impressive performance. Now, excited to share what our team has been working on over the last few months to bring this feature to more people. clickhouse.com/blog/mongodb...

I'm a big fan of choosing the right tool for the job. As much as I love Postgres and MySQL, these are optimized for OLTP workloads. When you have an analytical / time-series need, Clickhouse is a great choice. Read the paper this weekend. Tons of interesting engineering!

I love this piece from @charity.wtf -- it's so well articulated and deeply meaningful. I also love how many people resonated with it -- on a fundamental level we are all truth/purpose seekers

Well, this explains why the 2 mile long FAA corridor extending off the airport runway is off-limits to kiteboarders.

We are live with the ClickHouse 25.7 release webinar. Join us for demos & Q/A www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Ts...

Fun Friday 🤣: github.com/prisma/prism...

If you configure the Supabase MCP with read-write support it's easy to open yourself up to lethal trifecta attacks where an attacker can e.g. write a message in a support ticket with instructions that cause an MCP client to retrieve and leak data from other tables simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/6/s...

This essay by Nisheeth Vishnoi is a thoughtful meditation on the nature of science and a rebuttal to the notion that AI systems are going replace human scientists anytime soon. Worth reading. nisheethvishnoi.substack.com/p/what-count...

As much as I enjoy watching a good drama, the amount of drama in the database industry is a bit too much 😬

Nerdy computer analogy that runs between my partner and I: he's the latest M4 with 16 core, while I'm the single processor IBM mainframe. Reasons are ...

Friday thought: i majored in accounting but realized I didn’t enjoy auditing work so switched to computer science. Now a decade later I realize I am gradually transitioning back into an auditor (of AI code) 🙈

Came across this wizard-level project on HN 🤯 github.com/boricj/ghidr... And context from the author: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408...

Genuinely curious since i've been out of this space for a while: it's 2025, how long does it take for your data to get from your db to your data warehouse? 1 hour? 1 minute? 10 seconds? subsecond? And what do you consider as sufficient?

I know this isn’t rocket science, but embarassingly enough, it took me a while to figure out: If you like databases, work for a database company. Anyways, one week into ClickHouse and I am impressed at how well it operates and how smart/kind the people are. Looking forward to keep learning.

Fun fact: What does BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Doris/StarRocks have in common? They all have lineage that originated from search engine companies. BigQuery - Google ClickHouse - Yandex Doris/StarRocks - Baidu

Recently, I was working on an application that needed to know if it was connected to the internet. I didn't want to use ping (ICMP), and wanted to exercise the full stack used by real HTTP clients: DNS, TCP, and HTTP. So I did some digging, and here are the results: antonz.org/is-online/

Nonmonotonic clock spotted in the wild: I left `ping` running in the background on my laptop while it went to sleep, and later I found that my minimum round-trip time was a negative number!