It took myself and another engineer three weeks to build the VOPR. I mean, what’s the cost of never investing in determinism and in your own simulator? And which is going to give you that 100x bug finding (and fixing) velocity? We get so far ahead on TigerStyle, honestly anything else is 1% marginal.

in short, there's never been a better time to go really hard down a path, learn difficult things, put in the time and effort required to do exceptional work and in the long run you'll benefit from new tools amplifying your skills

Do you like databases? Do you want to hear two database professors rant about them? Do you need one of those professors to have a Turing Award for databases? If yes, then join Mike Stonebraker and I next Wed Dec 10 @ 1:00pm EST for database hot takes: dbos.dev/webcast-2025-in-rev…

Okay, this is a first 🙈

I'm hoping to find the time to write a series of posts over the summer on tools that I love. Here's the first one which I fell in love with just 3 months ago: mise blog.vbang.dk/2025/06/29/too…

God, I love @jdxcode's mise. I'm reading @thorstenball's newsletter which convinced me to try jujutsu (again), and thought to myself "you got me, let's try again" Just `mise use jujutsu` later and it's there, ready for me to play around with. Why isn't more software like this?

Tired of software relicensing and BSL, but don't know how to navigate it? @jorandirkgreef has a very interesting take on it. youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kzYlCT… This is preaching to the choir, but I'm sure there's a great podcast episode here, nudge nudge @bcantrill @ahl

Today @peer_rich is introducing our first hardware product, built by Invisible Computers, handcrafted in Germany 🇩🇪 Cal Ink (7.5") and Cal Ink Pro (10.2") - no color, just e-ink 🔅 - no operating system, just always on 🖼️ - no AI, but magical 📆 Win a signed copy by retweeting and commenting "What do you use @calcom for?" or preorder: → shop.invisible-computers.com… → shop.invisible-computers.com…

any database is just a WAL with indexes then it’s down to tradeoffs in guarantees, storage and indexes

Follow Phil's advice: subscribe The talks are awesome so far!

All of this talk about 10x developers; I never realized this is what people meant!

I had a once-in-very-rarely discussion today: blog.vbang.dk/2025/02/17/on-…

Need to explain reinforcement learning to non-technical people? Show them this video: youtube.com/watch?v=NUl6Qikj… It uses the racing game Trackmania to give an *excellent* intuition for how it works. Such a great video @yoshtm1!

Negative space in design is one of the most important aspects that you need to take care of. TigerBeetle talks about this explicitly in their TigerStyle document - "The golden rule of assertions is to assert the positive space that you do expect AND to assert the negative space that you do not expect because where data moves across the valid/invalid boundary between these spaces is where interesting bugs are often found. This is also why tests must test exhaustively, not only with valid data but also with invalid data, and as valid data becomes invalid." This focus on negative space also resonates with the Design By Contract paradigm first coined by Bertrand Meyer in connection with the design of the Eiffel programming language. Similar thoughts are also expressed in Floyd-Hoare logic, with a set of logical rules for reasoning rigorously about the correctness of computer programs. The idea is to assert negative paths equally exhaustively as the positive ones. And the most important part of using this assertion based programming is to have them in the production code as well.

Okay.. I had never thought there'd be value in _pretending_ that an index exists. This is a pretty interesting idea!

There seems to be a great move going on; you can also find me here

This is incredibly powerful. Even doing just one or two items from the list will improve your codebase immensely. I've yet to experience DST first hand, but I long for the day that I have an excuse to implement it!