Its PhD application season. Here are a few very cool new professors from my lab who you should apply to work with! Sam Kumar: UCLA Systems+Security Mae Milano: Princeton PL+Systems Stephanie Wang: UW Systems Emma Dauterman: Stanford Systems+Security Dixin Tang: UT Austin Data

Registration is now open for CIDR 2026 from January 18th-21st in Santa Cruz! Hope to see you all there! cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...

The CIDR 2026 Test of Time award goes to the 2007 paper "Database Cracking" by Idreos, Kersten, and Manegold. This line from their intro definitely held up well in the age of cloud + ML "A database system should be able to handle huge sets of data and self-organize according to the environment"

The accepted papers for CIDR 2026 are up! I'm looking forward to "I Can't Believe It's Not Yannakakis: Pragmatic Bitmap Filters in Microsoft SQL Server" and "Please Don't Kill My Vibe: Empowering Agents with Data Flow Control" cidrdb.org/cidr2026/pap...

very cool idea!

The South Bay Systems meetup is back on July 22! We're excited to welcome Jacopo Tagliabue (co-founder and CTO of Bauplan) for a talk on Speedrunning the Lakehouse: Shipping a FaaS that Looks Like a Database (and Vice Versa). 🔗 lu.ma/5zcpbae9

Great talks last night at SF Systems Meetup. Thanks to the speakers and to OpenAI for hosting!

Join us for the next SF Systems Meetup, generously hosted by OpenAI! We have an exciting pair of talks on fuzz testing and WebAssembly, you won't want to miss them: lu.ma/ltsl9g50

The next South Bay Systems meetup is live! 🦆 We're excited to invite @hannes.muehleisen.org co-founder of @duckdb.org for a talk on "Wrangling Data with DuckDB". 🗓️ April 23 at 6pm 📌 Hosted by Databricks at their Mountain View office. Register at lu.ma/ri5kt4vt Follow us: @southbaysystems.xyz

Upcoming events on local-first: • Local-first Conf Berlin, Germany, 26–28 May www.localfirstconf.com – for industry folks • Workshop on Theory and Practice of Decentralized and Local-First Software, Bergen, Norway, 3 July 2025.ecoop.org/home/plf-pla... – for academics (industry crossover welcome)

The lineup for the 12th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data is now up. The programme looks excellent, sad not to be able to attend. @abeldantas.bsky.social will be presenting our paper on VR collaboration. papoc-workshop.github.io/2025/program...

SF Systems Meetup signup is live. Hope to see you there! lu.ma/vqjf30k3

Excited to share our ICDT 2025 paper on a theoretical framework to connect CRDTs and the CALM Theorem! We formalize the intuitions given in the Keep CALM and CRDT On work about the gap between CRDT guarantees and monotonic queries. arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00222

fun to see hydro.run hit the top of Hackernews today. Happy to answer folks questions about Hydro in the thread there!

Still time to write a short paper for PaPoC.

Today is the last day to register for CIDR 2025 in Amsterdam! The best conference in systems with an awesome lineup this year! cidrdb.org/cidr2025/pro...

Better late than never 😂 Happy to share a recap of my SF Systems talk from last month. I've put together a summary of the session along with some great Q&A moments: www.dbos.dev/blog/sf-syst... Thanks to the organizers and everyone who showed up—it was an amazing experience! #dataBS #serverless

Fun NULL BITMAP today talking associativity. A topic I spend a lot of time thinking about. buttondown.com/jaffray/arch...

The PaPoC workshop is once again accepting submissions on distributed consistency. Deadline 15 January papoc-workshop.github.io/2025/cfp.html

Happy OSDI submission day to everyone! Wish me luck remembering to spell things the British way to match style with @nacrooks.bsky.social

The latest paper from the #1 CMU-DB PhD student @samarchdb.bsky.social is wild compilation magic! He automatically makes UDFs run 300x faster on SQL Server and 1.3x faster on DuckDB. Code: github.com/SamArch27/PR... Paper: www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/...

The next SF Systems Club Coffee Chat is at 10am tomorrow in Salesforce Park! lu.ma/qereq67o

Thrilled to share that our paper “Flo: A Semantic Foundation for Progressive Stream Processing” (with @mpmilano.bsky.social, Alvin Cheung, and @joehellerstein.bsky.social) will appear at POPL 2025! Check out the preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2411.08274, and read on for more!

This admissions cycle, I am recruiting PhD students to join my research group! If you're interested in systems or security (including intersections with cryptography, datacenters, AI, etc.), then please apply to UCLA Computer Science and list me on your application as a potential faculty advisor.

One of the highest compliments on scientific work is: “certainly someone must have done that earlier”

Such a good paper. I think I’ve cited it in every project I’ve worked on since it came out.

Where are lattices in the Gartner Hype Cycle these days? Have people realized the distributed systems lattices have nothing to do with the cryptography lattices yet? Are they disillusioned?

Waiting for all caps keywords in programming languages to come back into fashion. Fashion is cyclical my dudes.

That feeling the day after submitting when you open your laptop to the 50 tabs of papers you were citing and get to just close them all😌

Even if all the experiments supporting the relational model turn out to be falsified, I still stand by it.

Can we please just smoosh Theory A and Theory B back together?

The marketing team really dropped the ball when they gave this very cool branch decision theory the name “management science”.

Rust: something that systems, security, and PL folks finally agree on.

“The Original Sin in the theory of polyhedra goes back to Euclid, and through Kepler, Poinsot, Cauchy and many others ... at each stage ... the writers failed to define what are the polyhedra". - Branko Grunbaum

Folks are really sleeping on survey articles. Shout out to Foundations and Trends.

Is the recent rise of GPUs the liberation from the Von Neumann architecture Backus prophesied in ‘59?

Operations Research is so cool! Seems under-appreciated in many branches of CS. What a poor Decision ;)

Love this Terry Tao article on finding appropriately hard tasks for your energy levels. Clearly we need more low-energy research tasks. Research TikToks are a start, but I also want “The Real Postdocs of Palo Alto” or “Keeping Up With the CAP Theorem.” https://bit.ly/44N24A8

Who knew finding people to follow was such hard work