Principal Engineer at Tesla. Working on databases, distributed systems, and edge computing platforms for energy. Views are my own.
Joined July 2014
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156 Photos and videos
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Jun 7
Blogged: Adapting to AI: Adapting Organizations
blog.colinbreck.com/adapting…
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AI doesn’t change the fundamentals of organizations—it scales them...Both the good and the bad.
Jun 7
Blogged: Adapting to AI: Adapting Organizations
blog.colinbreck.com/adapting…
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Jun 7
It feels like someone needs to write a book called: "The Soullessness of a New Machine".
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Colin Breck retweeted
Bonus blog post for today about my instinctual revulsion towards AI slop:
surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/…
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Colin Breck retweeted
Jun 5
Overheard in Silicon Valley: “He’s an autist, but he’s our autist.”
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Jun 6
I believe organizations that have a culture of writing—real writing about ideas, from primary sources—will outperform those that do not.
May 31
Blogged: Adapting to AI: Write Things Down
blog.colinbreck.com/adapting…
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Jun 6
An interesting documentary on C . I spent the first decade of my career writing a time-series database in C .
youtube.com/watch?v=lI7tMxzS…
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Jun 6
I saw the transition of this database to C 11 which was very interesting. I also did work to adopt the Standard Template Library (STL) in many parts of the database, since the database was started before it existed.
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Colin Breck retweeted
May 27
DuckDB Labs becomes DuckLabs. We ended up working on more than DuckDB, i.e., DuckLake and most recently, Quack. It was time to change the company name to reflect this. Nothing else changes – read our blog post for more details.
ducklabs.com/news/2026/05/27…
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Colin Breck retweeted
May 24
Words should always be careful, but not necessarily precise. Sometimes the imprecise word is the right one.
Nothing should be too tight, especially your thinking.
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Colin Breck retweeted
AI increases the demand for coordination work but doesn’t reduce the costs of coordination work. Watch for coordination challenges to increase in the near future.
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May 14
I'm hiring in Palo Alto, Austin, Amsterdam, and Toronto. Reach out if you want to work on distributed systems, databases, or edge computing for scaling solar manufacturing, battery energy storage, vehicle charging, virtual power plants, and more.
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Colin Breck retweeted
May 14
It’s such an underrated skill.
In an organization everything is in constant movement. If you want to contribute a maximum you need to understand your environment, what is lacking and how you and team can contribute best. Self-Awareness.
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May 14
The number one skill for a manager? Self-awareness. Everything else is secondary.
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May 14
Read-only access to an S3 bucket, a Kafka topic, a data warehouse table, etc. is a gateway drug.
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Colin Breck retweeted
May 14
Great question.
I don't use LLMs for writing.
I use agents extensively for brainstorming, research, checking facts, handling markup, finding references, indexing data, and so on.
But I think that asking people to read LLM-generated text breaks a kind of social contract.
May 14
Hi Marc - curious if you have any updated thoughts on writing in the age of LLMs? Writing helps crystallize and defend ideas but what happens when both the reader and author start to lean more and more on letting LLMs think for them?
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May 13
Similarly, a columnar database is not a time-series database. Conflating the two has also limited innovation in time-series databases.
May 11
A metrics database is not the same as a time-series database. Conflating the two has limited innovation in time-series databases.
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