I chatted with Branimir Lambov from IBM on a decade of contributing to Cassandra, including his recent work to replace the Skiplist in Cassandra's LSM tree with a Trie. (no paywall) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/04/26...

Up next, Peter Alvaro on ladders, distributed systems, and… Zeno?

If you’re only going to one conference this year, make it systems distributed!

If I you like deep technical content, I highly recommend subscribing to The Consensus, or taking a stab at writing. Or both!

I approve this message cc @tigerbeetle.com

If hire in London and want to push frontiers of testing check this role out!

LLMs can trigger a potentially dangerous combination of factors: when person didn’t think code through enough to make it good, but make them feel affinity with the code and defend it as if they actually authored it.

One more time — I'm looking for new consulting clients. Some ways I can help: ∙ Fractional tech leadership (tackling "leadership debt" in small eng orgs) ∙ Full-stack, 0 to 1 projects ∙ Language design & impl (eg with @ohmjs.org) ∙ JavaScript/TypeScript perf (🔁 appreciated)

Finally got my copy of DDIA \o/ thanks @martin.kleppmann.com and @chris.blue! And for anyone who hasn’t yet read it at least 4 time, grab your copy!

The very first of The Consensus Standard just went out. This is a monthly newsletter for folks subscribing at the Standard Subscription tier. A collection of 1) articles written for The Consensus, 2) interesting jobs, 3) funding announcements, and 4) external articles I enjoyed.

Munich Database Meetup night! ClickHouse full-text search, and CRDTs over Painful Networks by folks from Helsing, hosted by codecentric.

At long last, @chris.blue and I have submitted the final manuscript of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, second edition, to the publisher. There is always more that could be improved but at some point we just have to call it done. Now it goes into production; probably shipping in ~4 months.

I can’t help it but completely stop taking anything the person wrote seriously if it feels like they used an LLM in an email. I can understand if one would check tone or spellcheck, but I feel like writing should still be done by a human. Am I old fashioned here?

After twitter turned into whatever it has turned into I kept hoping for a while that it’ll somehow recover, and posting both there and on BlueSky felt cumbersome. I don’t have twitter on my phone anymore, so let’s see if BlueSky can be as good as old twitter.

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

Abe Ratnofsky presenting "What's New in CEP-45: Mutation Tracking and Reconciliation" More info about this CEP here: cwiki.apache.org/confluence/d...

Ariel Weisberg presenting "Living with Accord"

@taco.cat presenting "Witness Replicas: Reducing Storage Costs in Apache Cassandra" Saving 1/3 on storage, cpu and IO, is some serious spare change.

Heading back home from Community over Code. So much new stuff this year in Cassandra: Mutation Tracking, Witness Replicas, Auto Repair, a bunch of new Analytics related work, and, of course, Accord!

Cassandra Team at Apple is searching for a fresh grad / person early in their career to join our ranks in SF/Bay Area! Come work on super interesting problems with world class team. Help us build better Cassandra! Ping me if you’re interested! jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

Reading Sunk Works after reading the Qualcomm Equation, and can’t help but wonder what happened to engineering. I can think of 2 companies in the entire industry (which will remain unnamed) that are delivering projects of immense complexity with tiny resources, while others are lost in processes.

Folks on database internals discord are voting for the next book. It’s a perfect time to join. This will be the third book we will be reading together, after Transaction Processing, and DDIA. discord.gg/GmchY45BbS

This bears out in practice, yep. But it may be more attributable to compaction strategies that limit the number of SSTables that may contain a key (e.g. leveled) and keeping up with compaction backlog. Most Cassandra deployments using LCS and default blooms maintain an SSTable-per-read count of 1.

I don't know how they have come to be regarded but I remember Google's Maglev and Meta's Katran & I remember enjoying the papers surrounding them. github.com/facebookincu...

Power of Two Random Choices! First paper was 1996 maybe, but here's a latter survey, www.recurse.com/blog/57-pape...

Just in case you didn't see this one www.usenix.org/conference/n...

Do you know any load-balancing papers? Please send them my way!

It's never too late to organize your huge pile of papers. Found 549 papers, only 156 of which had highlights or notes. However about 350 were pre-processed/marked. I kept better notes. Anyone got ideas about how to attach notes to PDFs?

A full house at AWS, Munich Database Meetup in full swing!

Thanks to fine folks from TUMuchData, Munich Database Meetup now has its own logo and website! munichdatabases.xyz

Hello 🦋 Happy to see many familiar faces around. Wasn't easy to find all of you (I probably missed many), so I created a starter pack to make it easier to (re)connect and nerd out about distributed systems, programming languages, and container stuff. Let me know who I missed! go.bsky.app/U1hZhum

So folks, what are the best starting packs around this platform?