Interviewed an LLM recently for a system design interview. Candidate responded every question with a 5 second lag. There was a bit of eye shifting, but *very* subtle. The answers were unnaturally fluent and canonical.
Joy Gao
@joygao.bsky.social
software engineer at ClickHouse; prev: Figma, WePay long-form ✍️: https://expertofobsolescence.substack.com
I think I have completed my five stage of grief (AI edition): denial:"AI is overhyped" anger: "AI code is a sloppy mess!" bargaining: "maybe AI will stay at jr. eng level..." depression: "does craftsmanship still matter?" acceptance: "well, at least I don't have to write boilerplate code anymore..."
This has been my observation, but curious if anyone else feel this way: - if you are a builder at heart, using AI to code energizes you - if you are a craftsman at heart, using AI to code feels like it’s taking something away from you
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!)
Nobody: Me: honey I think I finally have an explanation for why you have better senses (taste/smell/vision) than me: my ancestors invented agriculture earlier than yours, and evolution pruned my expensive sensory hardware to adapt to the modern world, while you are still fit for hunter-gatherer
One thing I'm excited about with The Consensus is giving you a hub to find interesting 1) jobs and 2) events going on in systems programming.
I will be speaking at the Monster Scale Summit this year to talk about ClickPipes. Hope to see you there! 😊
If you're curious what it takes to run #AdventOfCode every year, I have a talk called Advent of Code: Behind the Scenes that you might enjoy: youtu.be/uZ8DcbhojOw
Keynote: Advent of Code, Behind the Scenes - Eric Wastl
YouTube video by CppNorth
youtu.be
"eBPF is becoming the strategic platform of choice for infrastructure teams" This line from latest eBPF Foundation report written by Andrew Green is going to be doing a lot of work in the next decade. ebpf.foundation/new-state-of...
New “State of eBPF” Report Explores How Modern Infrastructure Teams Are Building on Kernel-Level Programmability – eBPF
New eBPF Foundation research shows that eBPF has become the strategic platform of choice for infrastructure teams across networking, security, observability, FinOps, and AI/LLM workloads. The eBPF…
ebpf.foundation
Nobody: Me: (in k8s land) if a replicaSet contains only one pod, is it still a *replica* set?
This is so cliche but it is also so true — every time I grow in life/career is when I find myself in a situation I’m not ready/comfortable with. I love routine, but have to keep reminding myself to break it from time to time.
Just like how human are bad at writing correct concurrent code, we are also bad at solving concurrent problems in our lives (both leads to *panic*, lol) So the advice of only introduce concurrency if you must applies as life advice too: solve one problem at a time, multitask only if you must.
This is great and to-the-point.
Xuanwo@xuanwo.io · 9mo agoFor everyone interested in data infra, want to get a quick sense of how big data works, how data systems are designed, and what the tradeoffs are, start with this share from @xiangpeng.systems, really nice intro! intro-data-system.xiangpeng.systems
Best of OSS -- when your customer find new ways optimize your Postgres ingestion pipeline. github.com/PeerDB-io/pe...
add support for CTID bucketing with snapshotNumPartitionsOverride by jgao54 · Pull Request #3624 · PeerDB-io/peerdb
PeerDB supports parallel snapshotting to optimize initial load time. To do this there are two ways today: we compute the total row count in a table, bucket the data evenly by watermark column -- ...
github.com
Hello, friends! After 10(!) years of #AdventOfCode, I've made some changes to preserve my sanity: there will be 12 days of puzzles each December (still starting Dec 1) and there is no longer a global leaderboard. Read more: adventofcode.com/2025/about#f... adventofcode.com/2025/about#f...
Quite optimistic about this project and the great people behind it.
Qian Li@qianli.dev · 9mo agoI care more about helping developers build reliable systems than chasing vanity metrics such as GitHub stars. Still, seeing the DBOS Python repo reach 1K 🌟 makes me smile. Thanks for building durable workflows with @dbos.dev. Full speed ahead - Java release coming soon!
Really great opportunity for those who want to learn more about sync engines / building real time applications.
Sync Conf@syncconf.bsky.social · 9mo agoFeaturing 👉 @notion.com 👉 @figma.com 👉 @swyx.io 👉 @threepointone.bsky.social 👉 @frankmcsherry.bsky.social 👉 @kyle.bricolage.io 👉 @jamescowling.dev 👉 @aaronboodman.com 👉 @schickling.dev 👉 @anselm.io 👉 @adamwiggins.bsky.social 👉 @powersync.com 👉 @b5.bsky.social 👉 @f0a.org 👉 @cdata.earth
Now that we have all retreated from Monday’s world wide war rooms… anybody beat this chaos monkey on hard mode?
Joy Gao@joygao.bsky.social · 11mo agoNetflix had it all wrong, don’t waste engineering resources to build your own chaos monkey infrastructure, just put production on AWS us-east-1 and you get chaos monkey for free. Just kidding, just kidding…
People are like programming languages, with personalities on a spectrum between strongly typed and weakly typed. The strongly typed prefer routines, structures, and consistency; the weakly typed prefer and thrive in a dynamically changing environment. Yes I am strongly typed 😆
We are hiring an EM for the database integration team (ClickPipes) at ClickHouse! job-boards.greenhouse.io/clickhouse/j...
Engineering Manager - Database Integrations
United States (remote)
job-boards.greenhouse.io
One of my favourite things about working at ClickHouse (and storage systems in general) is we get to nerd out on performance optimizations constantly.
Woke up this morning to find my gophers playing Go. Huh.
When working on an international team, one thing I learned is that interpersonal communication and team culture is navigated very differently from when the entire team comes from a similar cultural background.
[new blog post] Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/disa...
Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases
This short VLDB'25 paper surveys disaggregation for cloud databases. It has several insightful points, and I found it worth summarizing. T...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
Netflix had it all wrong, don’t waste engineering resources to build your own chaos monkey infrastructure, just put production on AWS us-east-1 and you get chaos monkey for free. Just kidding, just kidding…