Detecting server failure in a distributed system YouTube video by Ben Dicken

very interesting watch on the foundation of gossip protocols

youtu.be/S_cizfXDd3w?...

Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

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 Sauna Algorithm: Surviving Asynchrony Without a Clock While sweating it out in my gym's sauna recently, I found a neat way to illustrate the happened-before relationship in distributed systems. ...

[new blog post]

The Sauna Algorithm: Surviving Asynchrony Without a Clock

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/...

All the hot topics from the last year:
• More Postgres action!
• MCP for everyone!
• MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB!
• File formats!
• Market movements!
• The richest person in the history of the world!

TIL about REA for modeling digital accounting systems

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resourc...

Using Record to Model Immutable Data - Dev.java How to model your immutable data with records to make your code simpler and more readable.

I am starting to learn Java PROPERLY and got surprised at the availability of records for representing immutable data

dev.java/learn/records/

OH: We send a lot of stuff to Datadog, but mostly money.

Nice short read

eddmann.com/posts/mainta...

The discussion naturally turned out to discuss concurrency, Docker, Kubernetes, and the unreliability of the underlying network

What is a Flaky Test? Causes, Identification & Remediation | Datadog Learn best practices for identifying and reducing flaky tests in your environments.

Had to explain to a friend who is just getting started with software engineering what flaky tests are

If I had to do it again I would just redirect him to www.datadoghq.com/knowledge-ce...

Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction ...

I’ve yet to read it fully but so far it has been an interesting read

www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons... (2017)

GitHub - cwida/FastLanes: Next-Gen Big Data File Format Next-Gen Big Data File Format. Contribute to cwida/FastLanes development by creating an account on GitHub.

New data oriented file format just dropped.

FastLanes, "like Parquet, but with 40% better compression and 40× faster decoding". 👀

Seems it can exploit correlations between columns and have fully SIMD friendly encodings to help with vectorization.

github.com/cwida/FastLa...

Expert Generalists Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

FINAL §

In complex environments, the characteristics of Expert Generalists lead them to be particularly valuable in driving tasks to completion. Unmesh, Gitanjali, and I thus complete our article by summarizing the value of this skill.

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Rapid Prototyping a Safe, Logless Reconfiguration Protocol for MongoDB with TLA+ | MongoDB Blog Learn how MongoDB designed a safe, logless reconfiguration protocol using TLA+ to accelerate development and ensure correctness.

My colleagues Will Schultz and Siyuan Zhou wrote about a Raft enhancement they prototyped in TLA+, it's now how MongoDB actually adds and removes servers: www.mongodb.com/blog/post/te...

Nice post on costs and benefits of formal methods, by @m-dodds.bsky.social: www.galois.com/articles/wha...

Apache DataFusion. Putting Theory Into Practice by Matt Butrovich | DC Systems 004 YouTube video by Antithesis

TIL about German-Style Strings while watching (cool talk btw)

youtu.be/P_GLl14d9A4

Expert Generalists Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

Very interesting read

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Expert Generalists Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

NEW §

Three more characteristics for Expert Generalists. Unmesh, Gitanjali and I describe favoring fundamental knowledge, skills blend, and sympathy for related domains

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

AI at Amazon: a case study of brittleness A year ago, Mihail Eric wrote a blog post detailing his experiences working on AI inside Amazon: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet. It’s a great …

New blog post: AI at Amazon: a case study of britteleness

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/08/a...

The most interesting so far IMO has been about Postgres Partitioning Best Practices. Notable mention for pg_partman which I didn’t know about

Here we go PyCon Italia 2025

GitHub - davidrjonas/cargo-lockdiff: See what crates have changed after you run `cargo update` by comparing Cargo.lock to the vcs HEAD or file of your choice. See what crates have changed after you run `cargo update` by comparing Cargo.lock to the vcs HEAD or file of your choice. - davidrjonas/cargo-lockdiff

I learned about github.com/davidrjonas/... a couple of days ago while trying to get a nice view of which crates changed in a huge project after a massive “cargo update” that broke stuff. Maybe there is a simpler way to achieve the same task but this crate is damn nice

Alternatively, you use the latter methods and parse the infamous {"$serde_json::private::Number": "value"} map manually, which is not great either. Both the map key identifier and utils to work with it are not part of the library public API

See github.com/serde-rs/jso...

Okay, so apparently there is a workaround: you deserialize your JSON string into serde_json::Value first, and then you convert that into the struct of your choice by using serde_json::from_value.

Obviously it is not as efficient as using serde_json:from_slice or serde_json::from_str

A headline from The Times, with Nick Clegg saying that requiring permission from copyright holders to train AI on their word would 'kill' the AI industry. Boo fecking hoo.

My plans for a major retail emporium are being threatend by wholesalers who won't let me steal the stock.

Lost the last couple of days to serde-json arbitrary_precision feature… apparently it breaks quite a few dependencies including async-graphql float variables parsing

GitHub - nextest-rs/nextest: A next-generation test runner for Rust. A next-generation test runner for Rust. Contribute to nextest-rs/nextest development by creating an account on GitHub.

TIL about github.com/nextest-rs/n... and its process-per-test execution model

Security Features PostgreSQL 18 introduces oauth authentication, which lets users authenticate using OAuth 2.0 mechanisms supported through PostgreSQL extensions. Additionally, PostgreSQL 18 adds several features to validate and enforce FIPS mode behavior, and also adds the ssl_tls13_ciphers to let users configure which TLS v1.3 cipher suites the server can use. This release deprecates md5 password authentication in favor of using SCRAM authentication that was first added in PostgreSQL 10. md5 authentication will be fully removed in a future major version release. Additionally, PostgreSQL 18 adds support for SCRAM passthrough authentication with both postgres_fdw and dblink when authenticating to remote PostgreSQL instances.

PostgreSQL, the open source database that continues to get better, is introducing oauth support. This should help with database automation and hopefully bring us one step closer to moving away from static credentials and copying usernames and passwords around. www.postgresql.org/about/news/p...

Ian Lance Taylor deserves an award for the most patient person in Open Source.

He also has an amazing ability to translate the clarity of his thinking into the written word.

He has had such impact on the way people create software.

I really hope he continues to contribute to Go.