A recording of my SCaLE talk, “The Tip of the Iceberg”, is now available! It’s an overview of the Iceberg table format, diving into why it exists, how it works, and how to operate it. #databs youtu.be/RErvQrA7VZM?...

RIP Tony Hoare, who created quicksort: computerhistory.org/blog/in-memo...

Relational algebra is the most formal kind of mathematics because of all the little bowties ⨝

“Things good. Also bad. Good time for smart. Also for dumb. For believe things. Also for not believe things. Lights on, but also off. People happy, but also people sad.” Great book.

You might want to check on your apps. There’s some 🔥 🥒 🔥 spicy unpickling going on …

I didn't realize atomic bomb tests in Nevada were visible from Los Angeles. www.amusingplanet.com/2016/09/how-...

🌿 NEW STORY DAY🩸 “Drosera regina” is about a woman whose body behaves like a carnivorous plant, attracting men whether she likes it or not. Read here: www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dros... Listen here: tinyurl.com/drosera-regina Art by the talented @headfullopuddin.bsky.social

I keep getting into conversations with engineers where I talk about how desperately I want my database to support materialized views with incremental updates and too often I get a blank stare in response. so I wrote a new post about why you should care! sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/m...

left: the interview questions right: the actual job

(Resets the “days since it was DNS” counter to zero)

I have no plans to hire employees. Bubbles — Bits on Disk’s new Senior Director of Positive Vibes — provides the vibes for free, so I’m making an exception. Welcome to the team, Bubbles! Shoutout to @ragmopandgoose.bsky.social - I’ve never had a better officemate.

a discord is not a forum. I don't want to join your product's community; I want to read the solution to my technical problem from two posters who worked it out 4 years ago

There’s a weird and unexamined tension between the “AI makes it possible for unskilled people to write complex code” and “you need to start learning how to use these tools or you’ll be left behind” lines of rhetoric in a lot of recent AI codegen writing I’m seeing.

A great retrospective on a tool that saved my ass during my brief stint in engineering leadership. We would all benefit from more people sharing organizational infrastructure like this publicly.

I continue to believe that the discrepancy in the idea that the silicon valley "elite" read "seeing like a state" but still obsessively believe they can monitor and drive scaled efficiency across millions and billions of people is simply: they didn't actually read it

Billy corgan high register: it's time for breakfast Billy corgan low register: who wants pancakes

The program is up and tickets are live at www.hytradboi.com/2025/#program. I'll keep updating this thread as the last 10 talks hit camera-ready.

Are you serious right now? Christmas isn't for another 11 months! 🙌 aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh...

Wrote about the irrationality of the boss revolt mcfunley.com/on-misery

Love to live in a world where the fact checks need fact checking, but here we all are. This whole thread is worth a read.

Direct hit on the Sunset Fire in Hollywood. 🎯 Nice work, @lafd.bsky.social #LAFD c/o @nbcla.bsky.social 👨🏼‍🚒

For SoCal friends, Here is a list of resources for shelter, animal boarding, free items, and distribution hubs. These places can also use donations (e.g., food, water, masks, and blankets). Please consider donating if you can. For more info, visit Instagram: mutualaidla

Wow that’s some shit. A policy carve-out to specifically allow users to accuse LGBTQ people of being mentally ill. > “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality”

I continue to be deeply moved by this statement to the heavens by President Carter.

I’m just gonna go ahead and advertise this. @aphyr.woof.group.ap.brid.gy class IS a class for all staff+/principal engineer/architect types. If you are on the IC track you will benefit from this class. Do with that information what you will as new year budgets are discussed.

the fact that i resisted bringing up networking hardware here is a remarkable act of restraint www.junctionlabs.io/blog/maybe-i...

"It’s tempting to use the term intangible when what we really mean is that such things are hard to quantify in our modern institutional environment with the kinds of measuring tools that are used by modern bureaucratic systems."

That a dude with a couple cameras and a plate of appetizers can make something worth $82.5 million and a media company looks at that and goes "couldn't we make even more money if we had AI do it?" tells you exactly how stupid these people are

Right so after several recent incidents at work it seems like it's time to tap the sign again: Never apologize to me when your cat crashes a video call. Your cat is perfect. I understand that the begging for attention is not charming to you but it is to me and I wish to see your cat. Thank you.

"Kings hammer mistrust into swords, demand battle songs, and the world deafens with terror of one's neighbour. I turn to words. Their little lamps will outlive my flicker, that of lords, and of this current fear. [...]" - by Rosie Garland - @rosiegarlandwriter.bsky.social

The more catalogs you create, the stronger I become. -- @kevinjqliu.bsky.social

I started working on this full-sized 3D-printed Stormbreaker replica in late 2019 as a Halloween costume prop. Almost 5 years later, it’s finally finished and mounted on my office wall. 100+ hours of printing, over 4 feet long, weighs several kg. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

The existing integration between Iceberg and Glue is a confusing mess, so it’s heartening to see AWS full-throatedly embrace Iceberg after kicking Lake Formation Managed Tables to the curb earlier in the year. Very interested to see what they’ve done with the Athena and Spark integrations for this.

Doing some ETL on a legacy data warehouse today.

There’s a lot of excitement about S3 compare-and-swap support lately, particularly as it concerns Iceberg and the ability for “metastore-less” transactions. Personally, what I’d love to see come out of this is metastore-agnostic support for multi-table transactions. I miss those. #dataBS

Need a holiday gift for the nerd in your life? How about a copy of my new book, Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders! amzn.to/4eUz5zB

Much harder to admit to yourself that screaming at people online is a force which gives you meaning and now that you don’t have anyone to scream at all the old dark thoughts come rushing in like ice cold seawater in a sinking boat and it’s just you and the bone-deep certainty that one day you’ll die

SDF just released SDF lint, a sql linter written in rust and intended to be a drop in replacement for sqlfluff. The rust “this python library but fast” continues apace #dataBS open.substack.com/pub/sdfteam/...

Bits on Disk’s social media manager insists, quite loudly, that these are still called “tweets”.

OK fine, _one_ more social media profile.