Everything I learned about ClickHouse went into internal tools I can no longer read. The only pieces that survived are the ones I published.

Visual migraines made me quit a single daily cup. The withdrawal week was the hardest of my life. Four years later I'm back, and only pour over.

Watching people who care too much made me notice how much I hold back. Not going all-in avoids failing, and avoids feeling fully realized.

A walkthrough of how Modal starts multi-gigabyte container images without downloading them. Rebuilt as a small FUSE filesystem.

A walkthrough of the audio fingerprinting algorithm behind Shazam. No machine learning, just FFTs, peak picking, and hash table lookups.

I used to roll my eyes at people who buy all the gear on day one. Buying the gear is a statement of belief, and belief is what habits run on.

On GPU computing, AI accelerators, and why the next breakthrough in AI hardware might look nothing like what we have today

You're more tired than you think, and the worst thing you can do with a break is schedule it.

Reflections on spending four years at Tinybird: the technical growth, cultural values, remote work realities, and the gradual realization that it was time to move on.

AI confidently gave me bogus benchmark results. I caught it because I knew enough to be suspicious. Trust but verify, and you need expertise to verify.

My entire strategy is to do the work only I can do. AI can generate code, but it can't decide what's worth building, and it can't have taste.

A 2025 review. 166 hours of working out through the roughest year I've had, when showing up was the only thing I could still control.

A benchmark to prove alignment matters goes sideways. Sometimes being wrong teaches you more than being right ever could.

The frustration of feeling like a buffer instead of a builder, and learning to measure impact through team success rather than personal output

Query Booster is an intelligent feature that automatically monitors your database usage patterns and optimizes performance by fine-tuning data source schemas.

A 2024 review built on one number: 130 hours of working out, up 70% from last year. Unimpressive on its own, which is not the point.

Forget coding perfection. Real engineering magic happens when you understand problems, communicate clearly, and deliver value that matters.

The joy of chasing bugs and the skills it builds, and what happens when you point the same investigative instincts at your personal life.

I've never been enthusiastic about the AI revolution, then Zed's assistant wrote a working ClickHouse explain parser from a single prompt.

Discover /proc/thread-self, a Linux symbolic link to the current thread's task directory, offering useful information about system

A curated list of papers on databases, distributed systems, and data. The ones worth reading, not the ML breakthroughs everyone else shares.

Here's how we fixed a problem that had stumped us for over a year and saw a 5x performance improvement in the process.

Life would be easier if SQL and databases were more than just tools for data. Imagine building a machine learning algorithm with just SQL and ClickHouse

From 2015 to 2020, I participated in Quantopian and Numerai tournaments, earning around $350k and embarking on a highly profitable journey

A query or transaction lock on a table lasts for its duration, blocking other queries or transactions waiting for the same lock