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We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Dan Luu argues that AI coding tools let skilled engineers attempt far more ambitious software, using Michael Malis's pgrust (a Postgres rewrite with JIT-style optimizations whose testing has surfaced real Postgres bugs) as the running example, and explains why programming expertise still matters for judging model output.
27 min · 6,109 words
Push Ifs Up and Fors Down: The Idiom, Its Algebra, and Its Limits
Debasish Ghosh examines the 'push ifs up and fors down' heuristic from TigerBeetle's Tiger Style and matklad: what it actually says, how it mirrors predicate pushdown and batching in query optimization, how algebraic laws of functional programs such as filter/map fusion decide which rewrites are legal, and where the analogy stops paying off.
7 min · 1,570 words
PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
2 min · 387 words
Sharding vs. Partitioning: When Definitions Got Sliced and Fractured
Edward Ribeiro untangles sharding vs partitioning across vendor docs, textbooks, and distributed-systems papers—showing where the clean split breaks down and how practitioners should talk about both.
19 min · 4,297 words
All you need is Wide Events, not “Metrics, Logs and Traces”
Ivan Burmistrov argues that the three pillars of observability, metrics, logs and traces, cause needless confusion, and that a single system built on wide events, as he used at Meta with Scuba, can answer debugging questions, derive traces and metrics, and support cross-correlation and root cause analysis.
9 min · 2,057 words