The follow-up, on a harder question about the changing role of junior software engineers: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03... (And a 19th century book about trains 🚂)

Marc Brooker@marcbrooker.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New blog post, on the changing role of principal/staff+ IC leaders: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03... Core message: get building, get learning.

New blog post, on the changing role of principal/staff+ IC leaders: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03... Core message: get building, get learning.

New blog post, about a great little way to add fairness to distributed systems. Combining stochastic fairness queuing, best-of-two, and shuffle sharding. Read it here: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02...

Now on YouTube, Monday's CMU Database Seminar on Aurora DSQL. Thanks again to the awesome CMU folks (especially Andy Pavlo) for inviting me to do this talk. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK2h...

Aurora DSQL: Serverless, Scalable, Global OLTP Database System (Marc Brooker)

YouTube video by CMU Database Group

youtube.com

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Marc Brooker (@marcbrooker.bsky.social) will present the architecture of Amazon's Aurora DSQL Postgres-compatible serverless OLTP DBMS. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Aurora DSQL: Serverless, Scalable, Global OLTP (Marc Brooker) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

Amazon Aurora DSQL is a distributed SQL database, designed to make it... Read More +

db.cs.cmu.edu

The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. What does that mean for the future? New blog post: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02...

The world if MacOS supported SECCOMP_RET_USER_NOTIF

I'm still learning how easy it is to go from "software I wish existed" to "software that exists" now, especially for anything that's a script, automation, or small utility. Everything I internalized in 20 years about the cost of building things has changed in less than two years.

I’m happily building DSQL persistence for @temporal.io. @marcbrooker.bsky.social and team have gifted us a fab service. I readily accept I may be messing up my integration 😂 Guidance greatly accepted 🙏 (Oh! @kiro.dev has proven invaluable in this ❤️)

New blog post "Pass@k is mostly bunk" brooker.co.za/blog/2026/01... Pass@k, especially for k>3, can make basically anything look good.

In my first blog post of the year: The Box. Constraining what AI agents can do is required for making them safe and reliable. Pushing that control out of the agent itself, into its environment (The Box), is the only way to get the outcome we need. brooker.co.za/blog/2026/01...

Moving Towards Spec-Driven Development with Kiro and Agentic AI. Listen to @marcbrooker.bsky.social on The Real Python Podcast @realpython.com realpython.com/podcasts/rpp...

Episode #277: Moving Towards Spec-Driven Development – The Real Python Podcast

What are the advantages of spec-driven development compared to vibe coding with an LLM? Are these recent trends a move toward declarative programming? This week on the show, Marc Brooker, VP and Disti...

realpython.com

Finally, the session i have been most looking forward to at #reinvent2025! @marcbrooker.bsky.social discussing virtualization techniques used with services like #AgentCore - a 500-level Chalk Talk (with no slides). We need more of these types of sessions @awscloud.bsky.social

On the success of ‘natural language programming’ via @marcbrooker.bsky.social brooker.co.za/blog/2025/12... #programming #genAI #aI

New short blog post, touching on how I'd redesign UUIDv7 to keep the database performance benefits while mitigating most of the downsides. Short version: replace unix_ms with H(unix_ms, unix_ms >> 13 | salt). Get yer extremely niche RFC commentary here: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/10...

New blog post, reflecting on nearly seven years since the Firecracker launch, and how we're using Firecracker to power serverless databases (in Aurora DSQL) and infrastructure for AI agents (in Bedrock AgentCore). Here's the post: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/09...

NULL BITMAP: Using Huffman Coding for Sampling Discrete Distributions: buttondown.com/jaffray/arch...

Seattle friends - in case you missed it: lu.ma/umtmqb38 The Seattle Systems group is hosting their very first meetup! @marcbrooker.bsky.social will be presenting Aurora DSQL. Excited to see more systems groups popping up (thanks @eatonphil.bsky.social). My colleague @devhawk.net is co-organizing.

Transactions and Coordination in Aurora DSQL · Luma

Join us for a Seattle Systems talk that’s definitely worth your time as we welcome Marc Brooker, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, for a deep dive into the inner…

lu.ma

People often ask me about the differences in architecture between Amazon Dynamo (the 2007 SOSP paper), DynamoDB (the AWS serverless NoSQL database), and Aurora DSQL (the AWS serverless SQL databases). I memoized the response on my blog. brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08...

If you're into databases and you're in Seattle, @marcbrooker.bsky.social is talking at Seattle Systems on Aug 21: lu.ma/umtmqb38

Transactions and Coordination in Aurora DSQL · Luma

Join us for a Seattle Systems talk that’s definitely worth your time as we welcome Marc Brooker, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, for a deep dive into the inner…

lu.ma

LLMs are more powerful, more dependable, more efficient, and more flexible when deployed as a component of a carefully designed system. New blog post: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08...

I had a great time talking to Ben and Will from Antithesis on the BugBash podcast about software testing and validation at AWS. In this wide-ranging hour we talk deterministic simulation testing, fuzzing, formal methods, the history and future of testing, and much more.

Fun conversation with @jkxosound.com about where I think things are going in the AI agents space, Strands Agents, and rats 🐀

John Kutay@jkxosound.com · last yr.

@clare.dev is one of the leaders making AI engineering simple and scalable at AWS. Had a great time chatting with her as we discussed Strands Agents and patterns like “Retrieval as a Tool”.

Prototyping agents is easy, fast, and fun (especially if you use Strands). But how to you get them into production with all the scalability, security, and resilience you need? We've been building Bedrock AgentCore to answer exactly that question. Check it out: aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in...

Introducing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Securely deploy and operate AI agents at any scale (preview) | Amazon Web Services

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore enables rapid deployment and scaling of AI agents with enterprise-grade security. It provides memory management, identity controls, and tool integration—streamlining developme...

aws.amazon.com

I sat down with Darko Mesaros to talk about Kiro, specification-driven development, and putting AI-powered development in context of the history of computing. Is an LLM a compiler? What is a spec? How are specs like SQL? Check it out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdD9...

✨ Beyond Prompts: The Future of AI-Assisted Development | Marc Brooker x Darko Mesaros 🧠

YouTube video by Kiro

youtube.com

I've been using Kiro as my primary IDE for a couple months, and am super happy to see it launch. Spec-driven development is super powerful. More reliable, more repeatable, and easier to control than prompt-based vibe coding. Kiro's hooks are also pretty great. I use them to keep clippy happy :)

Kiro@kiro.dev · last yr.

This is Kiro - the AI IDE that works on your messy, real-world projects. Other AI tools lose context when projects get complex. Kiro gives you spec-driven development that scales beyond prototypes. Preview: kiro.dev/blog/introducing-kiro/?trk=6b579e54-2920-4e24-a25b-d3c887a6ffdf&sc_channel=sm

Finally got to fixing the "related posts" feature in my blog. The Amazon Titan embedding model on Bedrock, plus cosine similarity, does a nice job:

🚀 New AWS Bites episode! We tried Amazon #DSQL so you don’t have to (but you might want to) 👀 Luciano and Eoin put Aurora DSQL through its paces in #AWS Bites #Podcast Episode 145 🧵 Here’s what we found:

New blog post, with some career advice: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/06...

Here's the answer. On the left, we see the great "exponential benefit at linear cost" impact of redundancy. But that quickly tapers off as the single point of failure dominates. What can this teach us about building good HA architectures?

Marc Brooker@marcbrooker.bsky.social · last yr.

Availability intuition quiz! I have an architecture with N redundant components, each available 99% of time time, and one non-redundant component available 99.999% of the time. Sketch, on the provided axes, the end-to-end availability curve versus N.