Nice! A while ago I also wrote about Diffie-Hellman as an illustrated children’s book with no math whatsoever (using a paint mixing analogy) www.amazon.com/dp/173741905X/

Since 2017, @martin.kleppmann.com's Designing Data-Intensive Applications has been the definitive guide for building large-scale systems. One of our popular Monster Scale Summit sessions was Martin & @chris.blue discussing what's new in the 2nd edition. www.scylladb.com/2026/03/26/r... #ScyllaDB

I know a lot of you probably read or at least own the first edition of DDIA, but don't sleep on this, because it's a major update. Sixty new pages, chapters dropped, reordered, rewritten. @martin.kleppmann.com and @chris.blue have done a master job ensuring the 2nd edition up-to-date and relevant.

The NEW Designing Data-Intensive Applications dropped on my desk this morning and at 600+ pages it landed with a thud! If you work in data, this book definitely belongs on your shelf. It's undoubtedly one of the most, if not the most, important and relevant data systems book you could read.

We are excited to welcome @martin.kleppmann.com as a speaker for Local-First Conf 2026. Martin is one of the authors who coined the term and conceptualized the "local-first" movement. He is an Associate Professor at the Uni of Cambridge, working on decentralised systems and cryptographic protocols.

This week's deepdive hit a nerve. It's true: there are more and more signs that AI agents help increase *output* but they result in worse *quality.* Unless something changes. And something needs to change, clearly! The deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-age...

Thank you @steefjan.bsky.social for this nice write-up of my keynote at QCon London this week: www.infoq.com/news/2026/03... My slides are now up as well: speakerdeck.com/ept/mitigati...

Some very exciting news - it looks like the working group for AT Protocol at the IETF has been approved! (though not formalized in the datatracker just yet) This is a big milestone in the standards process. But is also just the start of the actual process - years of meetings & work ahead!

Looking forward to giving the morning keynote at QCon London in half an hour

CfP is open! May 1 — CFP closes May 15 — candidates notified June 1 — speakers announced June 15 — schedule announced We want to hear from YOU!

The Guardian has deployed an anonymous messaging system for whistleblowers to contact journalists, designed by my colleagues including @lambda.bsky.social. It’s very elegant hackaday.com/2026/03/09/s...

It's looking increasingly like these guys thought that if they could wreak more death and destruction than the other side then they would be respected as strong powerful men and they would "win" and that would make them big important heroes. Very possibly they had no rationale deeper than that.

Adding “datacenter blown up by Iranian drone” to my list of distributed systems failure modes www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

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 logical contrapositive for 3-year-olds: “If you take your shoes off at the playground, we go straight back home. Don’t want to go home yet? Then don’t take off your shoes.”

Does anyone have a favourite book on the history of nuclear weapons? I'm particularly interested in how the physicists grappled with the ethics of what they were unleashing on the world. I fear computer scientists might be the next to have such a reckoning.

Oh wow, German train delays are now so bad that someone made a website where you can bet on them (train data is real, the money is fake, but the whole thing is hilarious) bahn.bet

Just received my author copies of the second edition of DDIA! After years of seeing it only on-screen, holding the final print book in hand is very special. @chris.blue

Oh, is *that* your favourite breakfast, dear Waitrose?

Received an email containing the literal text “[Insert specific compliment example]”.

Our 3-year-old has discovered Gangnam Style and keeps asking me to sing it for him. My Korean is not up to scratch though, so I’ve been singing the lyrics from the Eton Style parody version, which I somehow memorised in 2012 and still remember. Anyone else remember this gem? youtu.be/9FtZkVRkusQ?...

Discworld QOTD, from Going Postal

new blog post on permissioned data in atproto! this one introduces "buckets", the protocol-level primitive for shared access control. I walk through two approaches that don't quite work and land on something that I think does let me know your thoughts!

I'll be giving a keynote at Local-First Conf, and lots of great people will be there. Love the thematic broadening of the conference (technology in support of user agency) this year. Grab your ticket!

I'll be giving a keynote at QCon London next month, combining both local-first software and atproto into a common narrative of reducing risk by making it easy to switch providers without losing your data. qconlondon.com/keynote/mar2... Pricy conference, but SPEAKER60QUK26 gives a small discount

Yesterday I gave a talk at the local-first online meetup in which I explore how local-first can help support technological sovereignty in an age of geopolitical tensions youtu.be/81rQgLLxnGU?...

We should legislate identity portability for email addresses. We have it for phone numbers, where the technical challenge was much greater. We should have it for email, too.

The grail of proving working languages is an old one. Proof asst. as guardrails is something a bit new. I think it makes a lot of sense for the software infra, rather than software interfaces. venturebeat.com/ai/lean4-ho...

I’m giving a talk at the local-first online meet-up on Tuesday. All welcome

We (@chris.blue and I) did an interview for the @antithesis.com Bug Bash podcast. It was an interesting discussion!

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!)

The part of "everyone becomes a manager" in AI that I didn't really think about until now was the mental fatigue of context switching and keeping many tasks going at once, which of course is one of the hardest parts of being a manager and now you all get to enjoy it too

[new blog post] Butlers or Architects? muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/butl...

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

A report from this retreat is now available. It's a good, thoughtful summary of how AI is changing software engineering. It avoids breathless hype, but it doesn't bury the head in the sand either. www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/...

@pvh.ca speaks truth, but there's one more corner in the design space: you can federate the infrastructure instead of centralizing it. That's the choice we made for iroh relays: you can run your own (it's OSS!), and endpoints connected to your relay can talk to endpoints connected to other relays.

This is amazing. Claude 4.6 finding 0days in mature open-source codebases. red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-da...

Recorded an interview with @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com for the Pragmatic Engineer podcast today. Lots of good questions and discussion

The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. What does that mean for the future? New blog post: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02...

felt the need. i feel vastly under qualified to write something like this, but i also feel its especially important that we think about the way we use language

Starting now! www.oreilly.com/live/in-conv...

I finally got to visit UC Berkeley for the first time today! Gave a talk and had good discussions about distributed systems with @joehellerstein.bsky.social & others from his group

Just caught myself trying to zoom in to a paper notebook by doing the pinch gesture

Spent the last few days at a retreat on the future of software development, convened by @thoughtworks.com and @martinfowler.com. Excellent conversations and plenty of food for thought www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/about-...

Exciting news for the local-first community! 1. Local-first Conf Berlin is back on 12–14 July: www.localfirstconf.com 2. The nice folks at @cultrepo.bsky.social have made a documentary about the movement: www.youtube.com/watch?v=10d8...

look mum I’m in a documentary about the next big thing in software www.youtube.com/watch?v=10d8... (thx @cultrepo.bsky.social and @localfirstconf.com !)

10m documentary film on the local-first software movement! www.youtube.com/watch?v=10d8...

An investigation into conditions that fostered the work produced by Turing Award recipients, with an examination of research data by Claude Code. cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the...

A discussion of law enforcement access to end-to-end encrypted communications, by my colleague Mort. One of the best articulations of the nuances and trade-offs I've seen. mort.io/blog/cosi-la...