Whatever your transactional database is, help me understand your use of it. This survey is run by @theconsensusdev, independent of any database or vendor. Repost or pass along to industry peers for broader representation forms.gle/fqjQsezWsztx...

For designers to work outside a codebase, you have to keep wireframes and implementation in sync. To that end, I'm sharing Figmimic, a bookmarklet that copies any website or webapp into Figma in an editable state. Try it: marcua.net/minitools/fi... Blog post: blog.marcua.net/2026/05/05/f...

A fine use of CLAUDE.md: a coworker instructed their agent to use Ska bands as example constants in tests. If you're wondering, the examples are geographically spread across the US (not internationally) and the later waves of Ska. They will be on `main` soon.

Donate $30 to an educational non-profit or open-source project and I'll credit you $30 toward The Consensus Standard subscription. I'm excited to support these organizations with you! theconsensus.dev/subscribe.html

The team of JupyterCon 2023, PyData Paris 2024 & 2025 organizes a new conference named Compute! Paris 2026 on open source computation and data. The event will take place on November 25–26, 2026 at Sorbonne Université in Paris. CfP deadline: May 24, 2026: compute.events/paris2026/cf...

I've been working on this over the last few months and in my opinion it is just beyond cool. Grammar of graphics for SQL users!

Late last year, I gave a talk at Northeastern to students in a few software engineering classes about what's changing and what's staying the same for junior engineers in industry with the introduction of coding agents. Slides and notes here: blog.marcua.net/2026/04/08/a....

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server. 🔗 ziptbl.com It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved. Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data: ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

Are you a researcher in CS or a CS-adjacent field curious about how an AI agent can help you with your research project? Want to try a new tool for your research support in a paid user study ($100, 2 hr)? Limited spot numbers. See details and sign up here: forms.gle/JzLtkAhe7Ttv...

I've never built anything for a decade professionally, but here we are! blog.marcua.net/2026/03/12/b...

"...managers who treat AI as a productivity multiplier for their junior engineers are optimizing for output. The managers who use AI to push their juniors into harder problems are optimizing for growth. These look similar on a quarterly roadmap. They produce very different engineers over two years."

I want to talk about why AI-based mass surveillance is so dangerous, and why I would oppose it no matter which party or president is in office.

chardet was vipeforked to MIT and I have thoughts about it. Spoiler: I like it. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5/the...

If you find yourself in Las Vegas, The Punk Rock Museum is a pretty good place to go! It's like 50% nostalgia for whatever 1-2 decades of punk you liked, 50% stuff Fat Mike / NOFX liked or collected.

Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code" We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come. blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...

Only a few more days (full consideration deadline: March 1) to apply to our lecturer position at @cornelltech.bsky.social!

CBGB&OMFUG. Iconic and mourned. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...

Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code" We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come. blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...

[new blog post] End of Productivity Theater muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/end-...

🦆 ↔️ 🦀 DuckDB Labs is looking for a Rust engineer to join our team in Amsterdam. 📝 See the details and application page at duckdblabs.com/jobs/rust_en...

Introducing polyglot - A Rust/Wasm SQL transpiler for more than 30 SQL dialects. It has 100% coverage for sqlglot‘s test fixtures. github.com/tobilg/polyg...

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

I'm scheduling speakers for NYC Systems 2026. Please DM or email me if you've got a staff/principal engineer or phd student who can come tell us something interesting about compiler / database / systems / infrastructure work! Schedule is on the site. nycsystems.xyz

So much great advice in this thread!

I am recruiting a postdoc in HCI & AI!
 Interested in augmenting human thinking and learning, futures of work & education, participatory AI, collective intelligence, or related topics? Please get in touch! This 2-year position will be based at a top university in Europe (email or DM for more info)

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

First blog post of the year! In "Claude Code and core dumps" I share how a coding agent helped me resolve a production incident. The agent parsed core dumps to track down a decade-old bug: someone had set a radio stream as their RSS feed! blog.marcua.net/2026/01/28/c...

💔💔💔💔

First blog post of the year! In "Claude Code and core dumps" I share how a coding agent helped me resolve a production incident. The agent parsed core dumps to track down a decade-old bug: someone had set a radio stream as their RSS feed! blog.marcua.net/2026/01/28/c...

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

As a teacher, I have really serious concerns about how to adapt to this: LLMs let you more quickly build complex systems, but you can't handle a complex system without having gained experience building/debugging/architecting simpler systems. Which means...

A reminder that it's your last day for 2025 charitable giving. Food insecurity, homelessness, and reproductive health services are big on my list of targets but whatever yours are, now's the time to finish them if you haven't

If like me you have a mental model that SQLite doesn't accept outside contributions you should update it, I just got called out by D. Richard Hipp for spreading that misinformation in a comment on Hacker News simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/29/...

Please don't forget to give what you can this year, we can't come close to filling the gap that our government has created but it still matters

I’m excited to share Review, a bookmarklet that makes it easier for you to code review AI coding agents. The bookmarklet turns all unresolved comments on a GitHub pull request into a Markdown-formatted text blob that you can paste into your coding agent of choice. marcua.net/minitools/re...

This is a great idea, and I'd be excited to buy you a hummus and hear about your research. NYC <3 research!

I've done a few conference talks and been on a few CFP boards now, so if anyone is nervous about submitting or wants an extra ear to chat about their topic with before submitting, I'm happy to workshop it with you! 😁

This is...sort of brilliant.

My favorite spot for dhindo thali in Jackson Heights just got cooler!

Hey NYers, today is the day -- get out and vote!

Was honored to help @chana.bsky.social edit this deep dive compilation of Curtis Sliwa lore gathered over weeks. There is so much jaw-dropping material, we simply could not bear to make it shorter than 76 slides.

It's not enough but we've gotta do what we can. cityharvest.org here in NYC or Bowery mission are good options

New short blog post, touching on how I'd redesign UUIDv7 to keep the database performance benefits while mitigating most of the downsides. Short version: replace unix_ms with H(unix_ms, unix_ms >> 13 | salt). Get yer extremely niche RFC commentary here: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/10...

This one made my brain move in many directions. Not sure I have some conclusive takeaway/worldview after reading it, but it felt good to sit with for a while: theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Social media feeds today are optimized for engagement, often leading to misalignment between users' intentions and technology use. In a new paper, we introduce Bonsai, a tool to create feeds based on stated preferences, rather than predicted engagement. arxiv.org/abs/2509.10776

Beautiful nostalgic piece by @adityagp.bsky.social! Don't miss the end for some nice reflections. Aditya's just getting started! :)

My student Theia Henderson just presented at UIST (and earned a best paper award) for her work "Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications". If you want to build a social app, Graffiti makes it simple and serverless; I explain why below. 1/

ayb now includes a web frontend! I hope this expands the set of people that can use ayb. The web interface lets you create databases, share them with collaborators, and query them from anywhere! More here: blog.marcua.net/2025/09/27/a...

📢📢 The September 2025 issue of SIGMOD Record is out, so is the Reminiscences column. Thank you, Viktor Leis, Anja Gruenheid, @senorcarbone.bsky.social, and @elenitz.bsky.social for the great contributions! pdf --> sigmodrecord.org/publications...

ayb now includes a web frontend! I hope this expands the set of people that can use ayb. The web interface lets you create databases, share them with collaborators, and query them from anywhere! More here: blog.marcua.net/2025/09/27/a...