Can you accelerate queries when your data is *partially* sorted (and e.g. you don't want to have to resort it). Yes. Qi Zhu and I explain how in: datafusion.apache.org/blog/2026/07...
Lili Cosic
@lilicosic.com
๐ฉ๐ปโ๐ป Core Database Engineer @InfluxData working on InfluxDB v3 Enterprise. ๐ Advisor to Polar Signals. I enjoy talking about databases, observability and good food. Previously @ HashiCorp, Red Hat. Now in Berlin ๐ฉ๐ช from ๐ธ๐ฎ
DataFusion is now a real thing -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_...
Apache DataFusion - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I recently joined Rich Bowen of the ASF to talk about Apache DataFusion's origins and increasing popularity YouTube is at youtu.be/6E5ER09F5SQ Just audio at wp.me/p8gHED-57w
Apache DataFusion, with PMC Chair Andrew Lamb
YouTube video by The ASF
youtu.be
This was a fun one! For @polarsignals.com's latest hackathon, I wrote an FSST decompression CUDA kernel and then optimized it by profiling with our new GPU PC sampling feature. www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
My Journey Optimizing a CUDA Kernel with Polar Signals | Polar Signals
A storage engineer's descent into warp stalls, memory throttles, and aligned stores
polarsignals.com
๐ Launching today: GPU PC sampling in production. Instruction-level profiling telling you why and where warps stall. Whether it is memory latency, scoreboard waits, or barriers. ๐ง Previously NSight-only territory. Now running in prod with low overhead. www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Open-Source Low-Overhead NVIDIA CUDA PC Sampling | Polar Signals
And how we made it happen
polarsignals.com
Is it just me, or would the ability for author to drag and reorder files in GitHub PRs save so much time during code reviews?
This quote by Douglas Adams is still my favourite and always so relevant: "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
Have a cool performance optimization you want to share with a community of latency-obsessed engineers? The P99 CONF call for speakers ends this week. ๐ Details at www.p99conf.io/2026/04/01/b...
Obsessed with Low Latency? Be Part of P99 CONF 2026
Obsessed with high performance and low latency engineering? Discuss your experiments, optimizations, ideas, and lessons learned with ~30K like-minded engineersโฆ at P99 CONF 2026!
p99conf.io
๐คUsing Polar Signals Cloud and Claude Code to autonomously optimize your code every day! ๐ Also: Check out our new website! What do you think? www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Autonomous Optimization with Claude Code | Polar Signals
Optimize your infrastructure autonomously every day with Claude Code and Polar Signals
polarsignals.com
Using Tokio for CPU-Bound Tasks (Works Really Well) youtu.be/FeqRdDG1Y7g (has nothing to do with AI, just scheduling and Database plans)
Using Tokio for CPU-Bound Tasks (Works Really Well) May 2026
YouTube video by Andrew Lamb
youtu.be
A coworker disappearing into a cave and coming back with 12,000 lines of code you have to review is cause for a heart attack. But, how do you handle the ever-increasing volume of code reviews? Our engineering team wrote down how we navigate code reviews at Oblique: oblique.security/blog/how-obl...
How Oblique handles code review etiquette | Oblique
Code reviews arenโt just about ensuring engineering quality, theyโre also about building team culture. Focus on communication and understanding rather than nit-picking style quirks.
oblique.security
OpenTelemetry โค๏ธ Prometheus! The #OTel and #Prometheus projects are strengthening interoperability. ๐ ๏ธ Building with both? Check out our client library comparison, plus updates on Prometheus compatibility and exporter spec stabilization. Links in ๐งต! ๐ณ๏ธ Running both? Take our survey! buff.ly/XhVm0Fg
Survey: ๐ญOpenTelemetry โ ๐ฅPrometheus Interoperability
Privacy notice: The data collected in this survey will be anonymised and publicly shared in the GitHub repositories prometheus-community/ux-research and opentelemetry/sig-end-user under the CC0 1.0โฆ
docs.google.com
"Slovenia stands alongside Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Iceland in refusing to take part in this yearโs 70th edition of the competition due to the EBU allowing Israel to compete despite criticisms of its conduct in the war in Gaza." ๐ www.euronews.com/culture/2026...
Slovenia to broadcast films about Palestine instead of Eurovision
Slovenia joins Ireland and Spain in not broadcasting this yearโs Eurovision Song Contest after a decision to boycott the live event over Israelโs participation.
euronews.com
We've been working on a major schema migration at @polarsignals.com that has unlocked some pretty wild improvements. Apart from a 50% (!!) reduction in storage size thanks to logical compression in vortex.dev, there has been a dramatic improvement in query performance.
who decided to call it firecracker-containerd and not crackernetes?
๐ Introducing the Polar Signals VS Code extension! See CPU time, memory allocations, and more as inline annotations, right next to your code. Works with Polar Signals Cloud and self-hosted Parca. www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2...
Do more with less. | Polar Signals
Polar Signals Cloud is an always-on, zero-instrumentation continuous profiling for CPU, GPU, and Memory that helps improve performance, understand incidents, and lower infrastructure costs.
polarsignals.com
Here is a new blog about Parquet Variant, including use case, and shredding examples parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/02...
After a few years focusing on cloud platforms, Iโve moved back to core database engineering in January! I wanted to move to our InfluxDB 3 team because I missed working on DBs. Itโs been an intense start to 2026, but the team gave me a warm welcome and I was able to start contributing quickly. ๐ฆ
TIL: notary in Germany reads out the entire contract before you sign it. It sounds like my personal hell: sitting still for 2 hours while someone reads out loud a contract in German, and then you pay them for the privilege. ๐ซ
Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taรญnos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous
Polar Signals at #FOSDEM 2026 day 2! Both talks in the Rust room. Profiling Rust applications with Parca Brennan at 12:30 @ UB2.252A (Rust) fosdem.org/2026/schedul... Frederic at 16:00 @ UB2.252A (Rust) Random seeds and state machines: An approach to DST in Rust fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
Polar Signals at #FOSDEM 2026 day 1! Tommy at 12:30 @ H.1308 (eBPF) OOMProf: Profiling Go heap memory at OOM time fosdem.org/2026/schedul... Thor at 17:25 @ UB2.252A (Databases) From Disks to Distributed: Our Journey of Database Evolution in the Cloud fosdem.org/2026/schedul...
FOSDEM 2026 - OOMProf: profiling Go heap memory at OOM time
OOMProf is a Go library that installs a eBPF programs that listen to Linux kernel tracepoints involved in OOM killing and records a memory profile before your Go program is dead and gone. The memoryโฆ
fosdem.org
Very excited for this year's #FOSDEM! Lots of talks by Polar Signals folks:
1/5 โก๏ธ Why Rust Will Help You Deliver Better Low-latency Systems and Happier Developers with Andrew Lamb bit.ly/47kgmwU @andrewlamb1111.bsky.social #RustLang #LowLatency
Why Rust Will Help You Deliver Better Low-latency Systems and Happier Developers
Andrew Lamb, a veteran of database engine development, shares his thoughts on why Rust is the right tool for developing low-latency systems, not only from the perspective of the codeโs performance, bu...
bit.ly
The hard things in computing: * cache eviction * naming things * figuring out which of your paying customers is DOSing your service
Super exciting to see two speakers from InfluxData here! ๐
TokioConf@tokioconf.com ยท 7mo agoWeโre excited to share the complete list of speakers joining us at TokioConf 2026 covering performance tricks, architecture patterns, and more. See all our speakers: www.tokioconf.com/speakers (Schedule coming soon) Tickets are on sale: www.eventbrite.com/e/tokioconf-...
The irony of shortening my Balkan name to "Lili" for the convenience of others, only to have people spell it "Lilli." ๐ซ
I was laid off last week. I'm excited to start a new chapter where I can put my knowledge and dedication to work. I believe every chapter closes to make room for something more rewarding. I'm keen to discover the next opportunity. Learn more: www.linkedin.com/pos... #OpenToWork
Chris Short Rรฉsumรฉ | Chris Short
I'm looking for a new role! With 30 years in the industry, I'm excited to start a new chapter. I believe every ending creates space for something more rewarding. I love taking intricate technical concepts and making them click for people. Whether through content, community work, or strategic enablement, my best days are when I help practitioners understand powerful tools and drive adoption. What I Bring My career bridges deep technical capability with clear communication: Content That Drives Adoption: I've created 700+ hours of video content and maintain newsletters reaching 6,300+ subscribers (DevOps'ish, EKS.news). I've given countless talks that translate complexity into clarity, driving revenue and reducing support load. Community Impact: As a former CNCF Ambassador and current Kubernetes Contributor Comms co-lead, I led communications for the K8s registry migration, achieving zero downtime globally. I've onboarded dozens of contributors and helped shape how we discuss cloud native tech. Shipping Big Things: I led the AWS re:Invent 2023 Kubernetes track with 50+ speakers and 30+ sessions, improving CSAT scores. I drove Valkey's developer engagement strategyโit's now the de facto Redis fork worldwide. I organized and hosted GitOpsCon EU 2021 with 300+ attendees, making it a top 2 KubeCon Day 0 event. Earlier in my career, I led a $1M AWS cloud migration with measurable savings. Technical Depth: I bring 30 years across IT ops, DevOps, the Kubernetes/CNCF ecosystem, open source tooling (Linux/Ansible), multi-cloud environments, and container technologies. Bonus: I'm now AI-enabled. What I'm Looking For Roles where technical experience meets storytelling. Three must-haves: customer-facing, cloud-native, and storytelling-heavy. Developer Advocate, Technical Marketing Manager, and Product Marketing Manager roles fit perfectly. Solutions Architect positions could work if they involve customer-facing technical communication and enablement. I'm especially interested in companies building cloud native tools or Kubernetes-based platformsโthat's my playground. The Remote Piece I need remote work as a disabled veteran managing nerve/spine damage, PTSD, and anxiety. My Detroit care team keeps me going. I'm near a major Delta hub and have done same-day international trips when needed. Remote doesn't mean unavailableโI'm committed to being responsive and engaged. Let's Connect After three decades, I know my value: I make complex tech accessible, build communities around products, and drive adoption through authentic technical storytelling. I'm available now for full-time roles; contract work could also fit. If you're building something great and need someone who translates technical depth into business impact, let's talk. Contact: https://lnkd.in/g-CbGNdT Resume: https://lnkd.in/gzdjdQxB Here's to embracing new chapters and exciting challenges ahead.
linkedin.com